Jet engine company hydrogen bake-out timing failure

Brief analogy. "We put it into the furnace to diffuse out the hydrogen within four hours of getting the test report back three days later from the test lab." Tom uses it as a parallel example of mis-sequenced processing — the operation was nominally performed but in the wrong order to do any good. May correspond to one of the existing hydrogen cracking cases in the canon but is too compressed here to identify confidently.

Once they got it, they sliced it up like a bologna, machined it, and reheat-treated it. When they reheat-treated it, they wiped out the stretching that had relieved the residual stresses. They introduced new residual stresses on quenching, and they didn't do anything to relieve them. Well, they said, "We purchased it stress relieved." Yeah, but then you reheat-treated it and you reintroduced residual stresses. This is sort of like the guys who said, "We preheated that steel on Friday and they're welding on Monday." Or like the guys at the jet engine company — "Oh well, we put it into the furnace to diffuse out the hydrogen within four hours of getting the test report back three days later from the test lab." Oh great. They didn't understand the physics or chemistry of what they were dealing with.