Four people, one microscope, a lot of opinions.

What we actually do

If a weld cracked and somebody's insurance carrier wants to know why, that's our job. If a fabricator wants procedure qualification records that will hold up under a serious inspection, that's our job too. We do metallography, hardness traverses, tensile and bend tests, macro-etches, and the kind of plain-English write-up that a judge, a field super, or an apprentice can all read without a translator.

We don't do finite element analysis. We don't do NDE in the field. We don't do lab work on anything we can't hold in two hands. If you need those, we know who to call.

Why we publish a quarterly

Because most of what we learn at the bench is useful to somebody working a seven-to-three shift who will never hire a lab. The Quarterly is how we pay back the trade. Every article is written by whoever ran the test. No ghostwriters, no marketing review, no case studies dressed up as advice. When we're wrong we print the correction on the front page of the next issue.

The crew