Is our view of old engineering distorted by the products which survive?

Your wish is, etc.

Also works at Audio Frequencies:

--Winston

Partly correct. Elemental white phosphorus is more toxic than potassium cyanide (orally). But strike-anywhere matches have not contained white P for a long time. The tongue-twister tetraphosphorus trisulfide is one of the ingredients in the white tip. It provides friction sensitivity with low toxicity.

Strangely enough, I was browsing in Stagers Store in Portage PA this summer, and saw a shelf that had SAW matches. Grabbed a pack of three boxes. They seem to work pretty well, though they have a tendency to break more easily than I remember from my youth (tasted an awful lot of sulfur dioxide while learning to strike a match on my teeth).

Best -- Terry

I took a 12 year old 25" Zenith in to a local dealer for a free estimate when the pix went red. Got the estimate @ $50 the next day with the advise that the next time the colour went wonky I should leave it at the curb. Picked it up next day and it has worked fine for the last six months. Happy Camper! Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Yes on the Muntz.

Don't know about the Yugo.

Joe gwinn

Thanks. Great picture. Funnily enough, it looks like a guy I knew at university, but it can't be him.

That picture looks fake. There's no indication of anything supporting the tubes, and you would expect it to show, either as a shadow against the brighter sky, or by reflected light from the tubes.

Best wishes,

Chris

Thanks. That's interesting. I wonder if Apple still follow your procedure?

Best wishes,

Chris

I know this is coming rather late in the thread, but can anyone think of specific examples of older products that were junk?

Many thanks,

Chris

There was or still is a stretch of very high tension power lines in New Jersey that handled 1 Million volts. It was a sight as we drove under them to visit Dad at Bell Labs.

Near the end of a long trip and wondering what the heck. The area near the lines were bare of all living plants. Not any grass. The High voltage produced long lines of purple light about each of the three phases.

It was a test line being tested in the field. Thought of the national grid...

Electric field will excite gas - simply by adding energy to an electron - it raising in a new quanta shell for a while and then when least expected (uncertainly principle) fall from this elevated shell and return to the normal level, giving off a frequency of light proportional to that of the change in radius. Nitrogen is purplish. Neon is orangish and is busted to red-orange by other chemicals.

The whole issue is to add energy to the atom within. RF or Heat or AF.

Martin

Mart> W>>

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I doubt it. It was very useful when one wanted an instrumented notebook to be cosmetically very similar to an un-instrumented unit or when a notebook *had* to be reassembled properly after inspection. That was admittedly somewhat rare.

However, it gave me confidence to know that I *could* restore the notebook to nearly 'as manufactured' status if I needed to. Without some record of where all the fasteners went, that would have been impossible.

Doubtlessly they are still using a zero-cost technique I gave them for greatly improving the reliability of a wiring harness used in every notebook, however.

--Winston

1980 Chevrolet El Camino

1) Never idled properly as manufactured.

2) Rumor had it that you had to disconnect the 'smog' computer to get it to run smoothly. Then mileage suffered (14 MPG!)

3) Transmission meltdown at ~45,000 mi.

Many other minor glitches and gotchas.

--Winston

That sounds interesting. Is it a trade secret?

Best wishes,

Chris

Oh yes, the truck Gene Hackman drives in the film Enemy Of The State? Cool looking truck, even if it was unreliable.

Actually, I was thinking of products from the '50s or earlier, if anyone can remember?

Best wishes,

Chris

Eh, eh. ...well, sonny...let's see here, by cracky...

Well, there were Bache Browne spinning reels. They were very expensive (early reels of the type) but they had thin line fingers made of stainless that would wear completely through in a couple of years of heavy use. Bad design, not thought through.

There were Mitchell-Garcia spinning reels (see what I was doing in the '50s? ). The big ones were not cheap. They had copper teeth on their drags that would strip off when you hooked a big fish. I wound up bringing in a

27-pound king mackerel hand-over-hand. Bad design, thoughtless use of materials.

There were Winchester single-barrel shotguns. I went through two of them in two weeks. Their barrels were brass-brazed, badly, onto the locking lugs. They'd break off when you shot them, with the barrel then landing on the ground. Piss-poor process and quality control.

Stainless kitchen cutlery from the 50s -- even the expensive stuff. It was made of 18-8 (300 Series) steel, which is too soft to hold an edge. Poor choice, or availability, of materials.

All of the little bellcranks on a piano I owned. Expensive piano, crappy plastic. Every one of the bellcranks cracked once they deplasticized. Poor material choice.

Most portable typewriters -- especially Italian Olivettis. Beautiful design, but complete crap. As my repairman said, they were made of "frozen shit."

Radiators for most American Motors (Rambler) cars. They leaked when new.

Jeez, I'm glad I got all that off my chest...

-- Ed Huntress

Burned into my brain is the 1970's-era sight of brand new Harley Davidson's sitting in a gleaming showroom...with a drip pan under each bike to protect the floor from the drizzling oil.

Vaughn

Oh, yeah. I'm not a Harley guy but the reputation is that they went through some real quality problems in the '60s and '70s.

-- Ed Huntress

If I recall correctly Robelson found that cryogenic treatment of stainless improved the hardness and edge holding. I just can not remember when, but think it was in the 50's. So that might have been

400 series stainless before the heat treatment was refined.

Dan

Actually, 400 is a different series of alloys, which form martensite when heat-treated, like ordinary hardening steels. 300 Series remains austenitic even if you heat and quench it, and it never attains the hardness of martensitic steels.

You can work-harden 300 Series somewhat, and there are some other tricks. But you won't get hardness from it in the Rockwell C 60+ category, as you can with 400 Series (440, etc.).

-- Ed Huntress

=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 Dan

My understanding is that 400 series stainless was used for knives with a heat treat of heat and quench. But the results were not very good until the quench was followed by a cryogenic soak which caused more marstenite to be formed.

I was hoping that you knew when cryogenic soaking started to be used.

Cryo treatment for tool steels goes back to the 1950s, or maybe earlier. I don't know when they started to use it for stainless.

What cryo treatment does is to convert residual ("retained") austenite to martensite. Variations in alloys and heat treatment can leave the conversion incomplete in spots, particularly in high-alloy steels. Chilling it to low temperatures causes the remaining austenite to convert -- assuming it was properly quenched in the first place. I don't know about 400 Series stainless but it seems likely it's in the category of steels that tend to retain some austenite without the cryo treatment.

Cryo treatment will not compensate for poor heat treatment. The austenite that's to be converted already must be "ready" to convert. That means that it was properly heated and quenched, but, for some reason, the austenite did not spontaneously convert to the martensitic grain structure. If the steel was quenched too slowly the austenite converts back to ferrite at room temperature, and that will not convert to martensite.

Here's a description that looks fairly good. Be wary of excessive claims for cryogenic treatment. It works, but sometimes the advocates go overboard with the claims:

-- Ed Huntress