Boston Navy Yard destroyer boiler pipe weld (stainless-to-chromemoly transition)

Tom's first big consulting case as a young MIT faculty member, ~1978. Stainless-to-2.25Cr-1Mo transition weld with persistent root cracking; NAVSEA procedure specified Inconel filler, contractor wanted to substitute stainless steel. Tom's solution: change the joint geometry (J-prep with a long land) to reduce restraint, leaving filler-metal specification intact. Used to illustrate (a) the Venn-diagram methodology applied under constraint and (b) that solutions sometimes come from the only variable left when the obvious ones are fixed.

Another case — this must have been about 1978. I joined the faculty in '76 and couldn't really quite feed my family. I got a call one afternoon from what used to be a Navy shipyard we had in Boston, since closed. They had a destroyer that had been dry-docked for a number of weeks. It was coming up on time to get out in another week or two, and it wasn't going to make it, because they were trying to weld chrome-moly steel pipes from the boiler.