Page 70 - MY STORY

In the meantime, Jim had made contact, that evening,

with Leo Harvey, president of Harvey Aluminum who
made the billet that forged successfully, in order to get a
solid metallurgical understanding of the cracking

phenomenon that accompanied TIMET’s product. He
was told by the Leo Harvey that the problem was obvious
— “the TIMET billets cracked because the titanium,

aluminum and vanadium atoms were not sticking
together.” I did not even try to argue the science. At least
Jim eased up a but when it was obvious I was not going

anywhere that evening and brought me dinner. I don’t
think he ever made his dinner date.

Early the next morning Phil Barr arrived to solve the
problem with our “hot-short” heat of the material. For
you lay-folk, “hot-short” is the way metallurgists

described materials that cracked during high temperatures
processing. Nothing Phil tried worked any better than my

approach, and his only recommendation was to
immediately fly a new set of billet heats out to LA ASAP.

Thank God the new heat of material forged beautifully
with no evidence of cracking. With the problem solved,
and forged hemispheres going out to the shipping dock,

Jim became a completely different person. He virtually