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!