41–50 of 196 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howmet_Aerospace
The big Cleveland press has its own wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000_ton_forging_press
> Forgings have the added advantage of variable grain direction which generally can be tailored to the stress patterns of a specific design. This is a super underappreciated fact! It's often repeated that forging is just stronger, but just squishing steel does NOT make it stronger. Forging a part is so much more than just smashing it into a shape. Steel cable is made of pretty ordinary steel which is stretched 100s o…
> Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day! ACOUP noted that blacksmiths might be assisted by unskilled laborers, strikers, who had the actual job of lifting the hammer and hitting the object with it.
Super interesting: > The largest, the 50,000-ton forging presses, were behemoths: each was the size of a ten-story building, and could exert enough force to lift an entire battleship. The 35,000-ton forging presses weren’t much smaller. and then > Following Germany’s surrender, the U.S. and the Soviet Union divided up its large press capabilities as well as its rocket scientists. The U.S. dismantled four German press…
Well when you have military supply vessels just hanging around in the area…
Based on my software experience, I can sort of go in blind and figure out how a system functions. I suppose that translates to real world too..
Tangentially, if there were a war today would the US be able to produce as much as it did in WW2?
They talk about machining, casting, and pressing. Mostly with casting and pressing in a good light, machining not so good. As somebody who knows absolutely nothing about this stuff, I wonder—casting, I thought, was generally a lower quality option (like cast iron doesn’t have fantastic high-performance material qualities, and I had some crappy cast pewter toys as a kid). Are there different, higher quality casting pr…
Casting isn't necessarily "lower quality," it just has different properties. It's also much older (by thousands of years) than machining or pressing, but you can't get to the pressing or machining step without having an ingot, which comes from the casting process. The main drawbacks of casting are you get a hard, but brittle product with (generally) uneven quality. There are processes (like annealing, though I don't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day! ACOUP noted that blacksmiths might be assisted by unskilled laborers, strikers, who had the actual job of lifting the hammer and hitting the object with it.
Unskilled feels unfair, it requires a fair bit of skill, and you're also learning how to forge while doing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well when you have military supply vessels just hanging around in the area…
For context, I work on my car a bit, and the shop manual for it is hundreds of pages (thousands?). Now scale it up to a factory, maybe without manuals. Disassemble, crate it, assemble it 5000 miles away. Based on my software experience, I can sort of go in blind and figure out how a system functions. I suppose that translates to real world too..
It drives my family nuts that I will assemble a piece of furniture without reading the instructions. But the thing is with a little mechanical sympathy, and a well designed product, there’s only one sensible way for the parts to go together, and if you organize them right while you disassemble it (granted, harder to do when shipping overseas) then you’re good.
Imagine you had a device where four hardened steel bolts held the critical parts together. It would be stupid if the handles used the same bolt sizes in mild steel, right? Someone will fuck that up and use the wrong spare parts or do deep maintenance wrong. You’d use a different size bolt so they can’t get mixed up.
>The savings on a heavy bomber was estimated to be even greater, around 5-10% of its total cost; savings on the B-52 alone were estimated to be greater than the entire cost of the Heavy Press Program.
These are wild stats.
Great article! I was fascinated to learn about the Heavy Press program for the first time, here on HN[1] a month ago, and am glad more about it is being posted.
It makes me think: what other processes could redefine an industry or way of thinking/designing if taken a step further? We had forging and extrusion presses … but huge, high pressure ones changed the game entirely.