Dayton Walther aluminum truck wheel fatigue case

Tom's late-1970s consulting case as a young assistant professor — Dayton Walther was the world's largest tire-rim manufacturer at the time, all in steel, trying to qualify aluminum rims to half-million- or million-mile fatigue limits. Welding-based approach failed; forging at Alcoa Cleveland ultimately succeeded.

I remember as an assistant professor, Professor Flemings arranged — one of his classmates whose last name was Walter, who graduated from MIT in the early 50s — needed some welding help because they were trying to weld aluminum tire rims. Dayton Walther Corporation was the world's largest manufacturer of tire rims at the time. In the late 70s everything was steel rims, because aluminum rims couldn't meet the half-million- or million-mile fatigue limits you had to have for truck wheels. Cars, yeah — we had aluminum wheels on cars, because they only went 100,000 miles before the steel rusted out anyway. But trucks get a lot of miles on them. I went out to Dayton Walther and met with him, and they were trying to put aluminum into the rims of truck wheels. We now do that. At Alcoa's Cleveland plant, they forge these great big — they don't weld, good reason to stay away from welding — they forge aluminum rims, and they're getting the weight out, and it saves I don't know how many thousands of gallons of diesel fuel over the life of the vehicle. They get a million miles on these things.