r/metallurgy

I'm playing around with a concept that involves a reed valve in a 1500-2500°f environment. It will need to maintain elastic deformation up to 60 times a second in that environment preventing the backflow of these hot gasses. It doesn't need to be a perfect seal, just pretty good, and not erode away too quickly. Also very thin, .020" give or take.

Does anyone have recommendations on a material that can take this sort of abuse?

Hello Everyone, first post here.

I need your help. Last march I became a university teacher of metallurgy on an engineering faculty on Spain. One of the classes I wil be teaching will be an open Blacksmithing course as I am the most dirty handed professor on the rooster.

The class will have around 18 students that I plan on dividing in groups of 6. They will have one weekly class of 6 hours on mondays for the two semesters, which equals to around 200 hours of work. The students are usaually well motivated to work with their hands but the harsh truth is they usally never seen anything more complex than a handrill in their previous years.

My workshop is a foundry, we are able to melt aluminum, bronzes and other low temperature alloys. We also have a small power hammer with a weight of around one kilo, not very powerful but saves some energy. We have also a couple of forges and anvils, a lathe, heat treat furnaces and general tooling.

I plan on starting the first three weeks, around 20 hours of work, with some first-contact sessions, one group will be casting some rings, other one forging and another one welding. And they rotate trough every method for the following weeks.

After that I will asign some group projects for them. My intention was to make them build machines that we could use in the upcoming years.

What Kind of machine or piece of equipment would you propose for projects like this?

I was think a belt grinder for one group, a natural gas powered small casting furnace and a rapier sword for the last one. The rapier will be a reproduction of the Industrial Engineer sword. A cool piece of spanish traditions, now lost in time, but i think I would be cool to make one by casting and forgin to flex on the management departments.

I also will let them make their own personal porjects such as knives, bracelets or belt buckles on top of making them build smaller tools for the workshop, such as anvil dies, tongs or hammers.

Thank you for your ideas, all of them are more than welcome!

I'm a second-year Metallurgy and Materials Engineering student. If you were in my position today, what would you focus on over the next two years to maximize your chances of getting a good internship or placement?

There seem to be different opinions. Several results talked about "fixtures," I'm not sure if they meant plumbing, electrical, or other. But I'm not thining of parts with anything flowing through them. Call it "passive" mechanical work; think brackets and fasteners.

Some of the information indicates that corrosion can occur if there is an electrolyte between them, so assuming the brass base was degreased and dessicated before treatment, there should be no issue, right?

Edit: I should add that the ultimate goal is to end with an anodized color layer, preferably on a brass base object.

Not sure if others see this too, but capacity on paper is kind of misleading in steel sourcing.

A mill can show 200k or 300k tonnes annual capacity and everything looks fine during supplier checks.

But when you actually try to place an order, it’s a different situation.

A big chunk of that capacity is already tied up. Long term buyers, repeat customers, traders with standing allocations.

So what’s “available” is usually not the full number you assumed when you first looked at the supplier.

I’ve seen cases where everything looked good during sourcing, but delays only showed up after PO stage because production slots were already gone.

Just wondering how others deal with this when shortlisting suppliers.

Do you assume lower usable capacity from the start, or is there a better way to judge it upfront?

Hi all, hopefully this an easy one and I’m left feeling dumb.

I work in a mechanical test lab where it’s very common for us to run a tensile test to verify incoming properties on our vendors pipe/plate. Got a number of vendors from just about everywhere and a range of carbon, low alloy, stainless, and nickel-based alloys. Sometimes the material comes in raw/as-rolled and sometimes it’s heat treated from the mill prior to shipment.

The samples we use have minimal/zero cold work and are not torch cut. We get a rough piece of the pipe/plate cut out then get it machined to the standard A370 strip-type specimens with a 2in gauge length and 1/2in width for the reduced section.

We generally get good matches on yield and tensile strengths, but occasionally our measured elongation is noticeably lower than the mill’s values. For example, if we get a low alloy pipe whose elongation is reported as 42% from the mill, sometimes we’ll get results closer to 34% or somewhere in that neighborhood. Other times on other tests we’ll get much closer matches.

Can someone chime in on where this occasional difference may be coming from? We are testing in the same direction (longitudinal) and are using the same strip-type samples as the mill and I’ve seen this behavior on numerous grades, so I tend to think it’s something in our testing process.

Thanks all,