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Re: Magnaflux

To: Dave Williams <dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us>
Subject: Re: Magnaflux
From: "W. R. Gibbons" <gibbons@northpole.med.uvm.edu>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 13:27:15 -0500 (EST)
On Wed, 5 Mar 1997, Dave Williams wrote:

> 
> -> ferrous metal is OK to use.  Suppose that piece of metal has been
> -> used for MANY hours...under hard loads.  i.e. a buddy of mine has an
> -> older airplane.  About 8,000 hrs on the engine.  He has the
> -> When does a piece of metal become unsafe to re-use even if it meets
> -> specs?.  How can you tell in a cost effective way.?
> 
>  As far as I know you can't tell by looking at it.  Eventually the rods,
> crank, or other components will fail due to fatigue, but it tends to be
> a rapid process - if you happened to Magnaflux it just as a crack formed
> you'd be okay, but propagation is rapid in fatigued parts.

This thread reminds me of an old movie, No Highway in the Sky, starring 
James Stewart as a "boffin" who calculates that the tail assembly will 
fall off a new airplane at x hours.  This is just an interesting 
engineering problem to him, until he gets on one of the airplanes that is 
near his calculated maximum hours.

I believe the movie was based on a book by Neville Schute, but I might 
have that wrong.

   Ray Gibbons  Dept. of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics
                Univ. of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, VT
                gibbons@northpole.med.uvm.edu  (802) 656-8910


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