WIX Archives
Re: Ross, salt water preservation again!!!!!
Posted by Dan Jones on Thu Mar 20, 2003 04:37:30 PM
In reply top Ross, salt water preservation again!!!!! posted by Cees Broere on Thu Mar 20, 2003 11:47:17 AM
Slightly unrelated, but still on the subject of storage/preservation/corrosion, I'd like to pass along a little story that might save someone some grief down the road;
About a year ago I bought some pieces (sight unseen) from a parts dealer in the southern US. What I bought (and what I got) was some small aluminum fittings that were NOS (New Old Stock - sixty odd years old, but never used and just like new) and when they were put in storage years ago I'm sure they were perfect, but in the intervening years while safely stored away in what must have been a nice, dry warehouse, they had deteriorated. What happened was the parts were made of aluminum but their identifying cardboard tags were attached to them with steel wire, and unfortunately due to dissimiliar metal corrosion happening over the years, one of the two had to be pronounced DOA when it showed up here.
Sad, eh? Just goes to show how easy it is to inadvertently screw something up. I had a whole raft of parts all similiarly tagged in the same fashion and it took me the better part of an afternoon to replace all the wire that I had used with waxed string. The dissimiliar metal thing never even occured to me when I was tagging the parts in the first place.
Happy ending though; I learned a valuable lesson, and corroded or not the fitting made a good pattern and the machine shop spit out a new one in about three hours. :-)