Page 137 - MY STORY

One of my ceramics engineers was assigned to support

that program and had overall responsibility for
mechanical property generation of the advanced graphite
material. He was a very hard, diligent worker, and put in

many hours of unpaid overtime just to get the work done.
The problem surfaced after a few months on the job when
I had an opportunity to review that data. I found the data

scatter to be excessive, and looked more deeply into the
test data delivered to the program. Unfortunately, I found
that little to no care had been exercised in the fixture

alignment of the tensile test series which amounted to
several hundred test points that were being used by the

program engineers as faulty design data. In defense my
engineer repeated the mantra of the test machine
manufacturer, Tinius Olsen -- “One Test is Worth a
Thousand Expert.

OPINIONS

I pointed that in this case, the reverse was true and that
“One Expert Opinion Trumped Over One Hundred Test

points -- if the Tests Were Faulty!!” We had to go back
and rerun those hundreds of test which showed
significantly reduced scatter, once the labs understood the

alignment requirements for these brittle materials. This