Page 67 - MY STORY

CRACKING BILLETS

Jim R was the owner and president of a company located

in a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood of Los
Angeles. They were a relatively small forge shop that had

some medium size drop-hammer forging machines and
furnaces for heating metal to forging temperature. They
had snagged a contract to make the forged hemispheres
for the high pressure, 25-inch diameter, helium pressure

vessels used in Convair’s Atlas ICBM Launch vehicle.
The forgings were made from titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V.

I received a call from Jim complaining that the forging
stock (8-inch diameter billet) supplied by TIMET was

cracking during the forging process and I’d better “get my
ass down to his shop” to fix the problem. I showed up
just after lunch and met Jim Rourke for the first time. Jim

was a large, angry, profane and demanding Irishman – I
had never encountered anyone like him in my
professional experience.

They had tried to forge several billets from the heat of
titanium TIMET had supplied, and he claimed they were

all cracking badly during the forging process. I went out
to the shop with him to get a better handle on the problem,