Editor’s Note

WARNING: metallurgical content

Welcome.  This issue’s cover shows a still from a test video for hard turning a ring gear blank.  The video was taken by the production team at an axle plant.  “Hard turning” means turning steel in a hardened state, after some heat treatment, rather than turning it in a soft state, hardening it, and grinding to final dimension.  In this application the rear of the blank was carburized, meaning it was heated with a carbon-bearing plasma, so that carbon diffused into the surface, then cooled rapidly to leave a surface layer rich in martensite, one of the hard phases of steel.  Unfortunately, in early test parts the thickness of the hardened layer was less than the depth of material to be removed in some places, so at various points you switched from cutting hard to soft metal, which doesn’t work since you need different types of tools for the two material states.  As a result, tool life and cost were both terrible.  The process needed to be fixed, so the poor production team had to entertain a whole series of roving experts who came to have a look and give them pointers on what they should try next.  

The fun thing about hard turning is that the chip absorbs a lot of energy and glows bright yellow as it’s cut off.  You see the same thing when cutting thermally sprayed coatings, as shown on the Pulsebeat 05 cover, and also when machining nickel alloys, if you are foolish enough to get mixed up in that business.  On the downside, tooling costs increase, due to the increased abrasion from the steel, but most other costs decrease because an expensive finish grinding step is eliminated.  So the tooling engineer still gets a healthy dose of negative feedback at cost reviews, while the Goodie Two-Shoes process, gaging, and controls engineers sit there grinning like the butcher’s dog.

Submissions for this issue were up 38% over last year, but are still manageable, so I have decided not to implement the change in submission periods floated in the last Editor’s Note.  The increase in submissions has made recent issues longer than the early ones, but it’s not clear to me that this is a problem if the additional poems are worth reading.  Page view statistics tell me that relatively few visitors to the site read an entire issue; the great majority are directed to a specific poem by a social media link, or come to look at the guidelines, and browse a few poems from there. The first group probably won’t care if the issues are a little longer, and the second group won’t notice.  So it’s more of a concern than a problem at present.

The reading period for Pulsebeat 13, which will be posted in January, 2026, begins October 1.  Until January, enjoy the wonderful poems in this issue.