Interesting Engineering Website

[Rannsachair]

Not sure how I came across this, though I certainly found it interesting:

Its a collaboration of a number of the the Professional Engineering Institutions on Engineering contributions of WW2: https://engineersatwar.ww2.imeche.org/

Some really interesting publications on it

It is proper technical articles, perhaps too detailed for your average person, though I love this stuff:

Some winter reading.....

 

[Rannsachair]

To get to the details, you go into the archives from: https://engineersatwar.ww2.imeche.org/resources/
Some things I had never thought about:

 

[frank horton]

thanks for that....always need more things to watch.......

 

[Mark 5]

Not sure how I came across this, though I certainly found it interesting:

Its a collaboration of a number of the the Professional Engineering Institutions on Engineering contributions of WW2: https://engineersatwar.ww2.imeche.org/

View attachment 520238
Some really interesting publications on it
View attachment 520239
It is proper technical articles, perhaps too detailed for your average person, though I love this stuff:
View attachment 520240

Some winter reading.....

Yours is an interesting thread and an interesting Website.

One thing that is obvious, " cooperation", something sadly lacking in todays industrial world and other industries.

 

[OJCar]

It is to be most emphatically denied that a number of tankers carrying Ethanol and Liquid Oxygen have been seen delivering to a green shed in Argyll.

 

[fizzy]

I remember reading that machine shops were surprisingly resilient to bombing and fires. Often just some patches on the roof or wall. Big old lathes and things were pretty resilient to blast damage unless pretty close.

Also many people are unaware of the role Britain played in the atom bomb. We gave all the technology to the Yanks. The Germans went up a blind ally and weren't as close as people think. If the Yanks hadn't entered the ware I suspect Britain would have nuked Berlin.
Read up on Tube Alloys and MAUD.
The Mond in Clydach produced the nickel gauze used for the uranium enrichment from uranium hexafluoride A process invented by a chap at ICI..

 

[fizzy]

To get to the details, you go into the archives from: https://engineersatwar.ww2.imeche.org/resources/
Some things I had never thought about:
View attachment 520241

As this was hard to read I took the trouble of using OCR on it. Here is the plain text. As suspected blast damage was minimal.

Here is the plain text from the image: Very interesting!

The Reconditioning of War-Damaged Machine Tools

By Gilbert Varley, M.Sc., M.I.Mech.E.

At the time when damage to factories by enemy bombing was most severe, circumstances necessitated the recovery of all possible plant as soon as practicable without regard to cost. Hence when very severely damaged machines had to be dealt with, and the problems raised were diverse.

Gutteridge, in a paper read before the Institution in February 1945,* describing the liability of damage of mechanical plant, gave five types of damage, an analysis of nine, lines of 205 machines that were dealt with, is given in Table 1.

TABLE 1. ANALYSIS OF WAR DAMAGE TO MACHINE TOOLS

Damaged by direct hit from high-explosive bomb... Nil" " blast... 18" " fire... 129" " falling debris... 56" " beyond repair... 2" " by blast and exposure... 182Total number of machines examined... 205

Three important deductions could be drawn from this table:—

(a) Damage by direct hit was so severe that the machine was not worth repair.(b) Fire was a very potent cause of damage.(c) Water, whether used as a means of fire attack or resulting from simple exposure to the weather in a wrecked building, was most destructive.

The effects of blast, as illustrated by the appearance of the small milling machine shown in Fig. 1, Plate 1, were usually very severe. Excessive fractures of main cast iron parts, and excessive distortion of shafts and screws were characteristic features of this type of damage, whilst fire caused serious cracks or distortion. Fire damage was the most difficult to remedy. When metal, and in severe cases bronze, bearings were melted. Typical examples are shown in Figs. 2 and 3, Plate 1.

A marked similarity in the position and extent of cracking was found in similar machines, emphasizing the known fact that considerable casting stress existed in complicated main body castings of machine tools. This showed the desirability of a stress-relieving process after rough machining; the author was meeting this situation in his production of new machine tools by annealing lathe beds at 450 deg. C. (842 deg. F.) for 3 hours; the resultant Brinell hardness numbers on lathe beds averaged 187 after treatment.

Damage due to falling debris and the falling of the machine due to collapse of floors, produced results such as those illustrated in Fig. 4, Plate 1. Little abnormality appeared in this, although the damage was usually severe.

The effects were evident in the case of damage by water. Where parts had attained high temperature in the fire, black oxide scale had formed on steel parts, otherwise the effect was one of normal rusting. There was a probability that some cracking of cast iron framing was due to sudden quenching from high temperature; water damage was generally the most extensive.

Electrical plant suffered severely by fire, and to a lesser degree by water. Motor windings were completely destroyed, the copper of the windings being partially melted in some cases, thus necessitating the entire rewinding of motors and complete replacement of switch gear and wiring. Prolonged soaking of undamaged electrical equipment to moisture also levied its toll.

It will be realized from the preceding account that when, after removing sludge of oil coolant, etc., complete dismantlement, difficulty was experienced with tight threads, bent shafts, partially melted metal—which locked shafts in place, and softened heads of "Allen" screws. The general method was to dismantle a machine in major units, using penetrating oil or "PlusGas," soaking for 24 hours to slack threads; in some cases bolt heads were cut off, and bent shafts were cut into pieces. The major units when severed were then immersed completely in tanks containing a mixture of paraffin and a very light spindle oil or containing a strong solution of soluble oil in water—preferably warm. After 24 hours (or more) soaking, further dismantling was managed without much trouble. Considerable use was made of photographs of major units before dismantling to serve as a record on reassembly.

"Allen" screws frequently caused difficulty as the softened heads sheared in the hexagon fit, and the only resort was to drill out the whole screw. This was a slow process, as the body of the screw remained hard in many cases. Castings were all cleaned by shot-blasting, and then given one coat of priming grey paint; shafts and spindles that were fit for re-use were chemically cleaned of rust by muriatic acid pickle, then scratch-brushed and polished. Ball races were cleaned by immersion in petrol, and were then regreased; headstock gears were shot-blasted to remove carbonized oil, the splined bores being protected by wood covers. The major work undertaken in the rebuilding process was that of repairing the broken, cracked, and warped main body castings by welding, and this operation on cast iron was a complicated metallurgical operation. In the process of welding, the composition of the filler rod or electrode was changed; silicon and manganese being reduced and combined carbon increased giving hard metal in the weld. Com-pensation for this effect was partially obtained by increasing the silicon and manganese of the rod above that of the casting. A hard ring was found in the parent metal around the weld, and the procedure of welding however carefully conducted produced cooling stresses. Heating prior to welding with slow cooling after was desirable to reduce these difficulties. By reason of the important metallurgical aspect of the welding operation, this work was all done in the iron foundry under the control of the foundry supervisor.

Three methods were used:—

(1) Gas welding with cast iron filler rod containing at least 3.0 per cent silicon. Castings were preheated and cooled slowly. This was the best method for wearing surfaces and was used unless the bulk of the casting prevented satisfactory preheating and cooling; close operational sequence great care on large complicated main body castings.(2) Electric welding with covered electrodes of proprietary brands suitable for cast iron; such welds tended to be unmachinable, and a wearing face was difficult to scrape up to a fit.(3) Bronze welding by arc, using proprietary brands of covered electrodes. This gave a strong and satisfactory weld for structural parts of the machine with less heat stress, and was used for all welds not crossing a wearing face.

These methods were used to deal with a fractured milling machine column, for which an iron patch was cast by ramming up the cavity of the column with sand, to the inside contour of

 

[Rannsachair]

As this was hard to read I took the trouble of using OCR on it. Here is the plain text. As suspected blast damage was minimal.

Here is the plain text from the image: Very interesting!

The Reconditioning of War-Damaged Machine Tools

By Gilbert Varley, M.Sc., M.I.Mech.E.

At the time when damage to factories by enemy bombing was most severe, circumstances necessitated the recovery of all possible plant as soon as practicable without regard to cost. Hence when very severely damaged machines had to be dealt with, and the problems raised were diverse.

Gutteridge, in a paper read before the Institution in February 1945,* describing the liability of damage of mechanical plant, gave five types of damage, an analysis of nine, lines of 205 machines that were dealt with, is given in Table 1.

TABLE 1. ANALYSIS OF WAR DAMAGE TO MACHINE TOOLS

Damaged by direct hit from high-explosive bomb... Nil" " blast... 18" " fire... 129" " falling debris... 56" " beyond repair... 2" " by blast and exposure... 182Total number of machines examined... 205

Three important deductions could be drawn from this table:—

(a) Damage by direct hit was so severe that the machine was not worth repair.(b) Fire was a very potent cause of damage.(c) Water, whether used as a means of fire attack or resulting from simple exposure to the weather in a wrecked building, was most destructive.

The effects of blast, as illustrated by the appearance of the small milling machine shown in Fig. 1, Plate 1, were usually very severe. Excessive fractures of main cast iron parts, and excessive distortion of shafts and screws were characteristic features of this type of damage, whilst fire caused serious cracks or distortion. Fire damage was the most difficult to remedy. When metal, and in severe cases bronze, bearings were melted. Typical examples are shown in Figs. 2 and 3, Plate 1.

A marked similarity in the position and extent of cracking was found in similar machines, emphasizing the known fact that considerable casting stress existed in complicated main body castings of machine tools. This showed the desirability of a stress-relieving process after rough machining; the author was meeting this situation in his production of new machine tools by annealing lathe beds at 450 deg. C. (842 deg. F.) for 3 hours; the resultant Brinell hardness numbers on lathe beds averaged 187 after treatment.

Damage due to falling debris and the falling of the machine due to collapse of floors, produced results such as those illustrated in Fig. 4, Plate 1. Little abnormality appeared in this, although the damage was usually severe.

The effects were evident in the case of damage by water. Where parts had attained high temperature in the fire, black oxide scale had formed on steel parts, otherwise the effect was one of normal rusting. There was a probability that some cracking of cast iron framing was due to sudden quenching from high temperature; water damage was generally the most extensive.

Electrical plant suffered severely by fire, and to a lesser degree by water. Motor windings were completely destroyed, the copper of the windings being partially melted in some cases, thus necessitating the entire rewinding of motors and complete replacement of switch gear and wiring. Prolonged soaking of undamaged electrical equipment to moisture also levied its toll.

It will be realized from the preceding account that when, after removing sludge of oil coolant, etc., complete dismantlement, difficulty was experienced with tight threads, bent shafts, partially melted metal—which locked shafts in place, and softened heads of "Allen" screws. The general method was to dismantle a machine in major units, using penetrating oil or "PlusGas," soaking for 24 hours to slack threads; in some cases bolt heads were cut off, and bent shafts were cut into pieces. The major units when severed were then immersed completely in tanks containing a mixture of paraffin and a very light spindle oil or containing a strong solution of soluble oil in water—preferably warm. After 24 hours (or more) soaking, further dismantling was managed without much trouble. Considerable use was made of photographs of major units before dismantling to serve as a record on reassembly.

"Allen" screws frequently caused difficulty as the softened heads sheared in the hexagon fit, and the only resort was to drill out the whole screw. This was a slow process, as the body of the screw remained hard in many cases. Castings were all cleaned by shot-blasting, and then given one coat of priming grey paint; shafts and spindles that were fit for re-use were chemically cleaned of rust by muriatic acid pickle, then scratch-brushed and polished. Ball races were cleaned by immersion in petrol, and were then regreased; headstock gears were shot-blasted to remove carbonized oil, the splined bores being protected by wood covers. The major work undertaken in the rebuilding process was that of repairing the broken, cracked, and warped main body castings by welding, and this operation on cast iron was a complicated metallurgical operation. In the process of welding, the composition of the filler rod or electrode was changed; silicon and manganese being reduced and combined carbon increased giving hard metal in the weld. Com-pensation for this effect was partially obtained by increasing the silicon and manganese of the rod above that of the casting. A hard ring was found in the parent metal around the weld, and the procedure of welding however carefully conducted produced cooling stresses. Heating prior to welding with slow cooling after was desirable to reduce these difficulties. By reason of the important metallurgical aspect of the welding operation, this work was all done in the iron foundry under the control of the foundry supervisor.

Three methods were used:—

(1) Gas welding with cast iron filler rod containing at least 3.0 per cent silicon. Castings were preheated and cooled slowly. This was the best method for wearing surfaces and was used unless the bulk of the casting prevented satisfactory preheating and cooling; close operational sequence great care on large complicated main body castings.(2) Electric welding with covered electrodes of proprietary brands suitable for cast iron; such welds tended to be unmachinable, and a wearing face was difficult to scrape up to a fit.(3) Bronze welding by arc, using proprietary brands of covered electrodes. This gave a strong and satisfactory weld for structural parts of the machine with less heat stress, and was used for all welds not crossing a wearing face.

These methods were used to deal with a fractured milling machine column, for which an iron patch was cast by ramming up the cavity of the column with sand, to the inside contour of

The full original papers can be downloaded from: https://engineersatwar.ww2.imeche.org/resources/resources-from-the-imeche-library-and-archive/ as pdf's so you can zoom in to read more easily.