A T joint is a welded joint in the shape of a letter T and your dinosaur has lots of them. Many of them are at points in the skeleton which are under stress and, eventually, the joints will break. For reasons explained elsewhere, you can't realistically reweld the joints, so what are you to do?
Here's an example of a typical broken T joint. This one is unusual in that the steel tube has fractured near to the joint. In other cases, the steel around the joint tears out. This shows that the weld is stronger than the metal around it, shifting the stress from the joint onto the adjacent components.
One of the most difficult joints to repair is the wing joint on a Dragon. This is a high load bearing joint, built in an extremely weak design with no reinforcement or stress management. The Dragon's wing will definitely break within its first year. The joint is very difficult to access and impossible to reweld without removing all of the Dragon's skin, so how to fix this, and other similar failures?
I've devised a bracket which fits around the T joint and, in conjunction with steel reinforced epoxy resin, the failed joint can be repaired.
To make the bracket, I take a small sheet of steel and bend it into a U shape. The sheet has four holes in which screws will go through to clamp the bracket onto the broken joint.
In this example, I also used a small piece of tube to fit over the broken skeleton tube for extra stress management. The tube was swaged onto the skeleton to hold it in place. This is only necessary when you are rejoining a broken tube. Normally, when the metal tears through on the top part of the T, this is not necessary.
The joint is filled with steel reinforced epoxy resin and the bracket is then clamped over the top.
It's not quite as good as new but it's as good as it can be.
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