Wind turbine shaft clink failure (Dallas)

Tom's second-ever encounter with a clink defect: roughly 2000, a ~24-inch wind-turbine generator shaft in a Dallas metallurgical shop showed a brittle fracture surrounded by fatigue, which the shop had been unable to diagnose. Tom identified it immediately from the Libra precedent.

I was actually down in a metallurgical shop in Dallas, Texas, once. They had a shaft about this big. It wasn't thirty-three inches, may have been twenty-four inches. They didn't have a big football in the middle, but it was a brittle fracture followed by a fatigue fracture on the outside. I asked the metallurgist who ran that shop, "That's an interesting fracture you've got out there in the back." It was just laying there. We were there for some aircraft part to look at. He said, "Yeah, we haven't been able to figure out what did that." I said, "What did it come off of?" He says, "That was one of the shafts for a turbine for a big windmill." All the big windmills generate electricity and have big shafts. I said, "Well, I know what that is. That's a clink." This was probably ten years ago that I saw my second clink. I've only seen two clinks in my life.