utility of 1941 welding textbook?

I love reading the Old books. They often cover things that are seldom used anymore, not because they dont work, but because they have fallen out of fashion, or because some technology made a sharp turn to the right and changed how things are done. One can often get some really good ideas from seeing how the old timers did things with less than the hip slick and cool machines. Which is what a lot of us have to deal with..old tech. I have a decent sized book shelf next to the terlet just for old machining books.

Gunner

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All I can say is "Knowledge is power". And "Free your mind and your ass will follow".... I still use Smoley's four combined tables for trig functions and another book for thermodynamics and statistical mathematics. There is NOTHING wrong with older text as you will get to see the technology evolve by doing so. My MBA books were the same as they were in

1956 when my dad got his and we still compare points so that is a pretty solid statement in itself. I always look at used bookstores and E-bay for interesting reading material. Besides the cost savings, a lot of the older text methods in welding sciences put more emphasis on the human operator rather than machinery or automation. No that is priceless.

All the best,

Rob

Fraser Competition Engines Chicago, IL.

first references to welding - I know from looking at the microstructures and the reported properties - that some electrodes in those days - the late 30's / early 40's - gave good welds judged by contemporary standards and some didn't. Here's a quote from Zapffe and Sims in 1941

``cellulose-coated electrodes previously dried at 108degC showed only collapsed brittle zone at the inter-bead disjunction, whereas ordinary electrodes used in an ordinary atmosphere or steam showed very mottled fractures with wide dissemination of defects''.

The "collapsed brittle zone" is certainly hydrogen cracking of the HAZ, which we now know can be prevented by preheat.

These "cellulose-coated electrodes" are certainly the ones which survive to this day as the xx10's - the cellulosics. They could even have been Lincoln 5's - whose descendent is the Lincoln 5P still on sale today.

In current practice, they shouldn't be dried. If you are using cellulosics, you might as well go all the way with hydrogen level. Too dry and the cellulose burns away before it gets into the arc(???) and everything stops working right - well that's what I see happening...

As I inspected their polished-and-microetched sample photomicrographs in the 1941 publication, I would have said these "cellulose-coated electrode" welds were fully sound. The other ones they refer to had visible porosity across the weld cross-section. So whatever they were using wouldn't be acceptable today.

Richard Smith

Something that is of historical interest is that one must remember just what is happening when that textbook was published. The world is in the middle of a conflict and welding is one of many innovations that will make a difference.

Sometimes if one reads carefully one can get a hint as to the importance of these processes. There often were shortage of materials and a pressing need to do the job as fast as possible. There were shipyards producing one liberty vessel freighter a day. That book was published in amazing times. Even paper and print was not to be wasted on the trivial. The book is valuable for that lesson alone. Randy

Great point, but wrong conclusion.

Publication of paper books is slow today, and was even slower when the state-of-the-art was manual typewriters and carbon paper.

A 1941 copyright on the second edition indicates that the text was updated in 1939 and maybe early-to-mid 1940. USA entered the war at the very tail end of 1941, and actually didn't really start to mobilize till 6-8 months later.

'41 might have been the official start but things started to happen in industry many years prior. A "classic" was fleets of transport aircraft built and delivered to an airfield in Ontario Canada for environmental/paint testing. As we say in the recent world... Yeh Right!