Naval Air Rework Facility titanium engine case repair

Brief reference. Norfolk VA 1968, glove-bag titanium disc repair using gas tungsten arc.

At the Naval Air Rework Facility in 1968 in Norfolk, Virginia, they would have a glove bag — you put your hands in like a blood bank to repair the titanium disks. They used gas tungsten arc to repair, very slow. TIG welding of the Sea Cliff was how they did the whole thing, two inches thick, because they didn't have a better way. They wanted to do it by gas metal arc, which is like submerged arc with the wire going in.

Tom at nineteen, welding titanium jet engine parts inside a glove bag with pure argon atmosphere at Norfolk, Virginia.

Cleanliness of your shielding gas is critical. Here's a situation where the welder is not in the glove box, but they put the part into a glove bag. This is what we used when I was nineteen years old at the Naval Air Rework Facility in Norfolk, Virginia. They had bags like this, and the welder would weld titanium parts for jet engines inside a pure argon atmosphere.

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Tom's second-summer civil service job during Vietnam war — rebuilding jet engines from crashes. Mentioned as biographical context rather than developed as a case.

The next summer I needed to make my three bucks an hour to pay MIT tuition, so I did the civil service thing again. They hired me at the Naval Air Rework Facility, where they rebuilt jet engines — we had all these crashes coming back from Vietnam and had to rebuild the engines. I was just an engineering trainee, but that was only two bucks an hour, so I took my old clerk job back at a buck an hour, and I worked 80 hours a week at two jobs 30 miles apart. It was not a great summer.

Tom's 1969 work at NARF Norfolk repairing titanium compressor diffuser cases inside argon-filled glove bags — cited as the origin of his familiarity with titanium shielding practice.

In Gurevich's book, you'll see one of the things the Soviets used to do — they used to put the welders in spacesuits and put them in an argon-filled room so the titanium was welded in an argon atmosphere. That's sort of an extreme. If you look in the welding handbook today, they'll show you glove bags. Here's a welder, and the glove bag is filled with argon. In 1969 when I worked at the Naval Air Rework Facility in Norfolk, Virginia, we were repairing titanium compressor cases for aircraft. This is what we'd use. We'd put the whole diffuser case inside one of these bags, fill it with high-purity argon, and the guy would go in there and weld through the gloves. He'd be on the outside welding through the gloves. This is standard technology — it was in 1969.

Tom's first-summer-as-intern story. Final-inspection crack in titanium compressor vane, repair by welding and shot peening using an Almen gage, Tom asked to sign off as engineer of record. Anchors the entire §4 narrative on shot peening and the §5 transition to liability.

When I worked at the Naval Air Rework Facility one summer between my freshman and sophomore years, they had a CF-30 engine — middle of the Vietnam War, they needed to get these back out so they could get shot down again. They had a shortage of CF-30s. They completely rebuilt the engine, it was in the shipping area ready to go, and the final inspector says, there's a crack on one of the vanes on the end of the compressor, made out of titanium. Filled up with a black goo plastic for dampening purposes.