What role does the threat of corrosion play in metal fabrication processes?
Jablons: It plays a significant role in two ways. First, metal parts that are subject to a corrosive or oxidizing chemical reaction must be protected both during manufacturing and in transit to the customer. This protection can be simple (but messy) such as a coat of oil used in the low carbon steel industry. This example is to illustrate the issue, although the medical device industry doesn’t usually work with such metals and almost never accepts parts coated in oil. Other protective techniques such as anodizing are obviously difficult to remove. The other problem posed by corrosion is to the manufacturing equipment itself. It is difficult to hold tight tolerances on parts if the components of the machine producing the parts are not correctly aligned due to a corrosive reaction. On the other hand, the threat of corrosion is a terrific opportunity for those manufacturers of metals that resist the particular corrosion problem encountered. MPMN: Metal fabrication is known for generating
