As usual, Club members gathered together at 6pm at The Rockies in Anstruther for their weekly meeting. After being welcomed by the President Elect, Andrew Lindsay, in the absence of our President John O'Neill who is on holiday, members enjoyed a meal together before Andrew conducted the business side of the meeting.

The speaker for this evenings meeting was one of our members, Eric Dewhirst, who gave a most interesting talk on metal fatigue. Eric highlighted some examples of accidents caused by this including, sadly, the recent Puma helicopter crash in Norway when the rotors detached from the rest of the helicopter.

The talk continued with an exploration of a link between this crash, the Forth Road Bridge and even vintage Austin seven cars that recently assembled in Crail: the link  - metal fatigue. Eric went on to say that although metal fatigue cannot be absolutely predicted, engineers are aware of the effects caused and machines and structures are very much designed with this in mind.

He discussed the way in which traffic density and axle loading has greatly increased since the Forth bridge was designed and quoted a Swedish study of steel bridges across Europe - 70% now more than 50 years old and 30% more than 100 years, with effects of fatigue and corrosion widespread.

We heard interesting statistics relating to metal fatigue on railways, aeroplanes, oil platforms and other machinery that shares this problem. The Austin Seven connection was down to crank shafts flexing during rotation and having a notorious tendency to crack in the middle.

He ended his presentation by telling us of times when things did go catastrophically wrong - the WW2 Liberty Boats where welded seams (and the wrong kind of steel) split in the low temperatures of the north Atlantic and many boats were lost - this did not happen when plates were riveted. A final example was of the 1950's De Havilland Comet aircraft when fuselage skins failed due to cracks propagating from the square corners of windows. In a lesson learned, todays aircraft all have rounded corners. A most interesting presentation much enjoyed by all. A vote of thanks was given by Ian Brunton before Andrew Lindsay closed the meeting.