Drmoonstone@aol.com wrote:
>Another story in the same vein that I heard many years ago about the high
>nickel blocks referred to blocks cast in Mexico and that it was not a factory
>improvement but rather just the nature of those blocks cast in that foundry.
>
Maybe they had bad standards for their spectrometer! Foundries have
buckets of material on the melt deck. Manganese, nickel, etc. depending
upon what they are doing. They pull a sample out of the ladle and send
it to the lab for carbon/sulfur analysis (where I came in) and to the
spectro for metals content. The lab will call up to the melt deck and
tell them to dump in extra material if needed and it is weighed out and
added to the "heat". This has to happen fast because time is money, plus
the carbon burns off if it sits too long and this is critical to
material properties.
There could have been a regional difference with a high nickel scrap,
but they usually control that by blending. Another regional difference
that does have an impact is sand. The mold quality varies by the type of
sand used and some castings just look so much better and the cores don't
shift as much and that is related to the type of sand used.
Other than watching the shuttle go up, there is nothing more exciting in
indusrty than standing on a melt deck when they are "blowing down" a 600
ton ladle of steel. Sparks fly and the earth moves.
Melusky
|