Most shops think about rust on a bolted assembly the same way they think about rust on anything else: pick a rust preventative, spray it, ship it. On a structural joint that reasoning can quietly cause a failure, because the thing that holds a bolted joint together is...
Most of what gets written about boiler layup assumes a big boiler. Thousands of gallons, a maintenance crew, a planned outage with a work order behind it. That is not the boiler that rusts in most Midwest plants. The one that rusts is the small package boiler in the...
When a machine fits in a container, corrosion protection is a packaging problem. When it does not, it becomes a weather problem. Out-of-gauge cargo — oversized weldments, structural steel, wind turbine components, large skids and frames — goes breakbulk on...
Ammunition corrodes like any other metal assembly, only with higher stakes A loaded cartridge is a small multimetal package: a brass or brass-plated steel case, a copper or copper-alloy jacket, a steel or lead core, a primer cup and a crimp. Store it in a humid...
An engine comes off the hot-test stand, the coolant is drained, and by the time it reaches the shipping dock the water left in the jacket has evaporated and left a bloom of red rust on the passages. Nobody sees it until a customer pulls a freeze plug, or a warranty...
If you build engines, you already know the problem even if you have never put a name to it. The engine runs on the hot test stand, it passes, it gets drained, and it goes to the yard or into a container. Weeks or months later it comes back out with rust inside a...
