Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Be Careful Using Equipment In The Cold

A buddy’s son in Fbks sent this pic. Temps were < -40*F “something”. Broke a fork on a big loader picking up big lengths of big pipe. This is the midsection of fork that broke. It’s 16x8×3. 55 gallon barrels behind if that helps for reference.

chinese steal?

Nah, extreme cold like that makes steel brittle.

No idea of make, model, mfg. Equipment came out of the shop and cooled until hydraulics had problems. Life is tough at 40-50 below.

Shrinkage

At the molecular level.

I guess I have a hard time understanding a material (steel) that has such a huge temperature range in its metallurgical makeup, can be that affected by a drop in temperature of 100 degrees from 60 above to 40 below…

Some kinds of steel are more vulnerable that other types. Early high-strength-low-alloy steel used in Liberty Ships contributed to their snapping in half in the North Atlantic. The issue involves the fracture-toughness at the tip of the growing crack.

The fact that you might not "understand it" does not make it less real or make the consequences any less catastrophic. The political-scientist geniuses running the Flint water plant didn't understand why they needed to add tiny amounts of phosphate to the water so they chose to not purchase the chemical. The lead-in-Flint water problem resulted.

There is a lot of stuff we don't really understand, DNA, the crap inside our computers, an angry woman's heart.

And fork lifts it would appear as well.

I'm with you. Never heard of such a thing.

That’s pretty dang cold. That I had to scrape a little bit of frost off my windshield this morning doesn’t seem so bad.

Oh, yeah it's real. Working in the Minnesota Mesabi iron range during the mid 1970's, many -30* to -45* nights. Simple things like an operator dropping a D8 dozer blade too hard, and snap a push arm.

I have worked around a lot of heavy equipment, and spent a year driving a big fork lift at a construction site. But down here in Dixie we never see 40 below. Four above is a really cold day for us Rebels.

-14 here yesterday, I took the dog out for her poo. She did not take long, thankfully.

I've done integrity inspections to certify machinery like that. Found a lot of cracking in key stress riser locations from abuse. The cold would exacerbate those issues.

Eventually it breaks.

Things break at -40, most construction and logging shuts down at -20 here because it’s too hard on equipment.

Consider the banana that gets dips in liquid oxygen then gets dropped on a table. Shatters like high quality crystal.
Same with mild steel. Bendable and malleable and easily (?) worked. Turn that into high carbon steel and it becomes brittle.

Not to mention the men. The equipment is owned, the men are rented.

Pecker hard, quenched steel is annealed back to knife hardness at 400, very generally.


I haven’t messed with it yet, but there is some high carbon steel in the basement waiting. Somewhere around 300F is all it takes.


It’s crazy how steel works.
Start playing around in a kind of scientific way, with known steel, and you discover things.

How soft a hardening steel can be.
It sounds different, I swear it feels different.



Book knowledge only warning!
Tests have shown a benefit from cryo-treating some stainless in a household freezer. Not equal to true cryo-treatment, but measurably beneficial.

I would love to see a better picture of it.


My old failure analysis professor would be weary of blaming it on the cold only.

Unless it was made in the same factory as the Titanic.

Look for the beach marks!

I enjoy winter and the activities that go with it, but I'm liking the 70's in the 10 day forecast more than the 15 we had Saturday morning.

Steel is also effected the other way (with heat)
I worked in a Steel Fabrication Shop and we were building a huge Girder it was around 120 ft long as I remember.

I was the young trainee that did all of the climbing for the older guy teaching me.

We would lay the Girder out (draw the lines on it for connection plates and holes) in the cool morning and our in house quality control would come out and check what we did in the after hot afternoon.

We laid the Girder out maybe 5 or 6 times because we were off on our measurements according to our quality control guy's.

The old guy teaching me had an idea of what was happening and had the quality control guy come out just as we finished laying the Girder out in the morning.

Well it was finally excepted.

That afternoon the old guy told me to go out with him and check the Girder in the hot afternoon sun.

That Girder grew 8 inches in the heat.

I asked the old guy how do buildings not rip them selves apart with the expansion and contraction.

He went into a lengthy explanation as to why buildings stand with out falling apart with the expansion and contraction.

This old guy was a Rivet Catcher way back in his younger days building Lost Angeles.
I owe that guy a lot from what he taught me in the short time we had together.

What I know about steel is this.... When I bump my head against anything made of steel, my head hurts.

I forget the coefficient of expansion for steel, would need to ask one of my engineer brothers - but it IS substantial.
When I build long pipe rails (or sucker rod runs), I'll sleeve them every 50' or so. Have to use a longer sleeve than you'd initially believe to keep them from coming apart in sub-zero temps.

The largest rail I'm aware of is 136 pound per yard.
Believe it is not, extreme cold can make 136 pound rail literally pull itself apart.
Extreme heat in the summer, and 136 pound rail will expand until it crawls off the ties out into the right-of-way.
Those are call "sun kinks"!

Could be that it had been stressed prior and had invisible to the eye fractures. They were moving 36” diameter, 40’ long pipe. Don’t know the wall.

Might not have been cold-only, but it did happen IN the cold. Few good things happen to machinery below -40!

What happens if you drop your plastiGlock when it gets cold?

People neither!

On the North Slope, they don't usually move drill rigs when -40F or colder and helicopters are grounded.
I've seen goose necks pulled off trailers and cold axe heads break.

Nothing new in cold country.

We had -62F two weeks ago......just hunker down as it's really tough on vehicles.

I live about ten miles from CRTC [us army cold regions test center] and I know a couple engineers there. They have some great stories.
During last year's Army cold weather training exercise, it was only -20F but the winds were howling. Three Humvees caught fire and burned up.
A couple porta buildings also burned and there were over 100 cases of frostbite in the troops. Bunny Boots are now back on the equipment list.

We qualify ten to twelve welding procedures each year for my welding business. Charpy V Notch test (CVNs) are performed to test toughness. There is a huge difference in toughness between 0ºF and -70ºF.

Why do you heat things to shape them?


The same thing that happens to plastic vacuum lines when you try and get a wrench in behind them in subzero temperatures?

As a crane operator on the slope I could work without issue to -30f but after that it took approval as that's about where stuff starts to go south.

When you see someone throw an extension cord off a truck and it shatters.....you'll understand.

I used to work for a company that manufactured mining equipment. At the request of a customer in Northern Saskatchewan, the company designed & built a machine for the customers needs. The most expensive item ever made in Ky. at the time that was to be exported.

Anyway, the build start was slow. Sourcing, waiting & special treatment of every component. Special cold weather steel & welding wire, hydraulic fluid, wiring, etc. etc. was in the design & build specifications. I knew some of the specs then & understand a little about metallurgy but that was decades ago.
Now all I do know is just what Vern said. At those temps most materials just don't cut it.

I always imagined that low enough temperatures would make steel brittle, but that was just an intuitive thing. Intuitive "knowledge" is often wrong. I guess it can be correct now and then.

Our shop would glue the coolant lines on our trucks. It seems that the swing from operating temp to ambient could be too much for the clamps to effectively seal.

Another fun one is sitting in a hydraulic crane and scoping out 100' of boom. The rig would rattle and go "BANG". Suddenly we lost boom length due to oil cooling.

Pumping grease at -30 is impossible without arctic grade grease.....and propane heaters simply don't work.

Too many things seem to go wrong when it gets -20 and colder. Sometimes it just best to wait the cold out. I know it’s just not feasible for big businesses, but at a personal level, it’s just too hard on equipment.

Read and article written when they began building the Alaskan Pipeline.
Guy goes out one super frigid morning and gets the equipment running and warming up.
Operator jumps on a big, rubber tired front loader, kicks it in gear......and the tires crumble! The tires, apparently, had frozen! ALASKA WINS AGAIN!

-30 in SWMT and the school bus is still gonna pick your kid up on time. All manner of life continue, as everything just can’t be shut down for 2 weeks because it’s cold. Never noticed any cars breaking in half.

If memory serves me correctly there are a couple of rifle barrel manufacturers that do not recommend stainless steel rifle barrels to the used in extreme cold temperatures like could be seen in Alaska.

Mine, almost never, works well in dry cold conditions.

Warm & moist, for the win !

The cold may have been a contributing factor, my take is, it was ready to break.

Plenty of forklifts running around Fairbanks lifting heavy schit in cold weather.

I have never heard anyone say don't take your forklift out if its -30.

Steel dont care, oil, hydraulics, transmissions, they dont like it much. Either leave it run or let it warm up for a long time.

Yep ironbender……..iron, carbon steel gets pretty brittle, doesn’t bend (see what I did there) very well below a -30 F.

I know that we were cautioned about ferrous metals losing much of their flexibility when colder than -30 F. memtb