Longfellow Bridge renovation welding consultation

Used as the prototypical "client calls with old steel of unknown composition" example. Tom describes the recurring pattern: a thirty-year consulting relationship with an MIT mechanical-engineering spinoff firm that would call him when they needed to weld old steel in renovation projects (Longfellow Bridge cited as example), and he could not develop a procedure without composition and thickness data.

For about thirty years I worked with a company that was a spinoff of mechanical engineering here at MIT, and they would call me up from time to time. They'd say, "We're redoing something" — like Dr. Belmar [?] said, they're redoing something like the Longfellow Bridge. They've got this old steel in this old building, and they want to know how to weld it. What's the welding procedure they want me to develop — the type of heating and cooling for some particular steel? And I'd say, "Well, what's the composition?" They'd say, "We don't know." And I'd say, "Then I can't tell you, because I need to know how much carbon, how much alloy content is in the steel. I also need to know the thickness of the steel."