[MMike]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/18/titanic.rivets.ap/index.html

This seems to have been an excessively long investigation. NTSB must be slipping......

 

[stevew]

Law suit?

 

[Dartman]

The ship I was on in the Navy was rushed to get out of the yards on time.

The builders took some shortcuts like tack welding the plates of the upper superstructure and filling the gap with duct seal compound (aka; monkey sh!t) and painting over it so it looked like a weld.

At the time it was being built for the Shah of Iran.

When we got caught in a north Atlantic storm the duct seal started falling out and water was coming in. Whole sections of the ship had to be rewelded and xray inspected after. :huh:

 

[valve bouncer]

Signs says "Titanic Prohibited"

 

[JohnE]

Either way, the movie still was the suck...

 

[neanderthal]

For you uber geeks.

http://www.metallurgy.nist.gov/webpages/TFoecke/titanic/Titanic.pdf

 

[LordOpie]

If by "iceberg", you mean "celine deon", then yeah.

 

[ire]

If by "iceberg", you mean "celine deon", then yeah.

You must spread rep

 

[JohnE]

For you uber geeks.

http://www.metallurgy.nist.gov/webpages/TFoecke/titanic/Titanic.pdf

I am no metallurgist...but is testing metals that are almost 100 years old going to accurately reveal their points of failure? Metal ages, and while under water it will be exposed to further degenerative processes...is testing really going to reveal the true reasons behind the failure??

And the movie still sucked.

 

[ohio]

I am no metallurgist...but is testing metals that are almost 100 years old going to accurately reveal their points of failure?

Not that hard figure out to the chemical composition and even the temper (crystal structure), even if they're heavily oxidized on the exterior, if you can find one sample that didn't oxidize. At the pressures and tempuratures the rig is at, I suspect there were no problems finding an uncontaminated sample. If you have that, and the physical dimensions, you can predict and even repluicate the failure mode.