[lovehamr]

Dan, that was an excellent dissertation. You mentioned that your company's machine bolts broke in only three cycles, that's incredible. At a job I worked a few years ago one of my many duties was firearms accident investigation. One of the problems that we had were slides on our pistols cracking and sometimes failing completely. During the finite element analysis (FEA) on one such failure it was determined that a crack on one side had cycled over 600 times before its eventual catastrophic failure. The metal in the slide of this pistol, though not soft by any means, withstood considerable bending moments before its failure. I wish I could remember the Rockwell hardness rating that we found in that slide but alas I'm afflicted with CRS (can't remember s**t). The point is that, as you pointed out, there are jobs for hard, brittle metals and there are jobs for softer, more pliable metals. The two are not the same. If used in the wrong application, either way, the results can be most unpleasant.

Steve