Losses Through Metal Fatigue

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31001, 5 March 1966, Page 21

Losses Through Metal Fatigue

(Special Correspondent NZ.P.A.)

LONDON, March 3. Metal fatique—industry’s “unmentionable disease”—is costing Britain about £lOO million a year and experts warn that the figure is likely to get higher as industrial processes are speeded up.

The British Welding Asso-' cation, which has worked out this staggering loss, also' claims that 75 per cent of firms are ignorant of the dangers and cost of metal! fatigue. Firms, it says, are either I apathetic or openly hostile to recommendations from the 1 association, which is Europe’s leading authority on the subject The association spends £7OO 000 a year studying the metal fatigue problem in fields which range from

atomic power stations to saucepans. Mr Bevan Braithwaite, head of the association's design advisory board travels the country trying to explain the ease for metal fatigue, but has found that 50 per cent of industrialists were not interested and another 25 per ■cent were hostile. I “It is fantastic when you I think that at least £lOO million—and that is a conservative estimate—is being lost every year,” he says. The association has based its £lOO million figure on the fact that £5O million is lost in metal fatigue repairs or replacements and at least another £5O million is added through loss of production.