Technical Talk

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It can be tough to figure out where to start in the quest to understand problems. How can we develop the ability to move ahead?
By developing clear thinking. However, these four words don’t help anyone acquire that skill.

This is a very important topic that needs to be addressed. Design engineers and brazing-shop managers need to become “agents of change” to bring about a needed adjustment of thinking in industry about the need for external fillets in brazing.

There are two basic answers that can always, or almost always, apply to anything that “failed.” These two basic answers are almost always true.

Bainite is a phase in steel that can be created by heating the steel up to an austenitic temperature followed by a designed cooling procedure.

Someone recently suggested to their aluminum-brazing client that they should conduct a high-temperature burnout cycle in their vacuum furnace by “heating the furnace to 1600°F to ensure that all the oxides are removed.

Some people think they can tell if a part broke due to hydrogen embrittlement by looking at it. This is not correct. The timing of the crack is only one of the key factors that needs to be documented if hydrogen embrittlement is suspected.

Time waits for no man. Time cannot be saved. Time only moves on, even as we speak. The process temperature will determine what microscopic transformation will occur (including grain growth). Transformation is the resulting metallurgical effects of the process time and temperature selected.

Brazing filler metal (BFM) is available in a variety of different forms, shapes and sizes, such as wire, rod, paste, sheet, foil, preforms and cladding. 

Most of us have heard someone complaining, “There’s a lack of critical thinking here.” But what do they usually really mean? If we stop for a moment, perhaps we will realize that it often means, “I disagree with your conclusion.” But does that mean that the thought processes used were inadequate?

Temperature uniformity within a furnace can be defined as: “a uniform temperature set to operate within a specific tolerance band to create conditions under which a final uniform resulting metallurgy will be accomplished in the treated component.”