NORTH AMERICAN NEWS
by John Wolz, editor
GlobalFastenerNews.com
Elgin seeks top status among North American fastener manufacturers
Elgin Fastener Group LLC announced it has acquired Vegas Fastener Manufacturing. The Vegas announcement came a week after Elgin acquired Telefast Industries of Ohio.
oil and gas, diesel engine, food processing, power turbine, water works and general industrial markets. EFG, headquartered in Batesville, Indiana, now totals nine US specialty fastener manufacturers: Ohio Rod Products,
C 10th O
Leland Powell Fasteners, Chandler Products, Silo Fasteners, Landreth Fastener, Quality Bolt & Screw, Northern Wire, Telefast Industries and Vegas Fastener Manufacturing; plus Best Metal Finishing. EFG is a portfolio company of Audax Group. Liter described Telefast as “a natural fit for our acquisition strategy as they expand our manufacturing capabilities
to include the cold heading of internally threaded fasteners”. Founded in 1986 by Jeff Ferry and Kathleen Ferry as a manufacturer of internally threaded fasteners supplying distributors, today Telefast produces both internally and externally threaded products for distribution, automotive, agriculture, construction, government and after-market/MRO industries.
Failure of ‘bolts’ on new Oakland Bay Bridge
The failure of 32x three-inch diameter anchor rods on the new US$6.4 billion eastern span of the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco has captured the attention of the US fastener industry in recent weeks. These are the latest two reports from Jason Sandifur, consulting editor at GlobalFastenerNews.
April: Two bolt batches at center of Bay Bridge probe
Officials investigating the 32 snapped anchor rods on the new US$6.4 billion eastern span of the Oakland Bay Bridge have narrowed their focus to two “distinct” batches of bolts manufactured by Ohio based Dyson Corporation.
ne batch included a total of 96 rods manufactured and installed in 2008. The failed “bolts” came from that batch, which was encased in concrete as part of shear key construction. A second batch of anchor rods,
totaling 192, were manufactured in 2010 and installed in 2011. Those two batches of anchor rods - ranging from 9 feet to 24 feet in length - are at the center of an investigation into how specialty bolts from a respected domestic manufacturer failed within days of coming under load on a major US bridge. Bridge officials discussed their findings at a Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) Oversight Committee meeting held on 10th
April
in Oakland, CA. The bolts that fractured lay encased in concrete for several years but could “not be stressed until completion of load transfer” on the bridge. On 1st
March 2013, construction
crews torqued the nuts for the rods. “Within a very short period of time we started discovering
fractured rods,” noted toll bridge program manager Tony Anziano. Three days to be exact. That’s when the first bolts fractured, according to California Department of Transportation records. Most of the bolts fractured on days 6 and 7, with new fractures discovered until day 14 when the remaining 64 anchor rods were detensioned. At the 10th
April meeting Anziano said workers have extracted
four of the failed rods so far, and all four had fractured near the bottom of the rod “at the first thread above the nut.” Anziano
24 Fastener + Fixing Magazine • Issue 81 May 2013
The 2008 bolts “We had a hydrogen problem with the 2008 bolts,” he said.
“It could have occurred in the manufacturing process, or it could have occurred after the bolts were embedded and exposed to water. It’s important to remember that water is H2
O. Hydrogen
is a component of it.” Officials also combed through extensive quality control and quality assurance documentation to ascertain what might have gone wrong. Documents from the 2008 batch revealed two non-conformance reports. One involved a paperwork problem (materials were sent for delivery ahead of documentation) that was quickly remedied. The second NCR “related to the test results for two components of the 2008 rod assemblies: hardness of the nuts and elongation of the rods”.
described the fractures as having a “darker, flatter crescent moon shape” - an important indicator of where the fractures began. Following the fractures, bridge officials launched a forensic
analysis with electron microscopy and mechanical property tests to probe the problem. Those tests revealed “geometric shapes with actual spaces between them, which is fairly strong evidence that there was hydrogen in the rods which produced this fracture.” Anziano pointed out that hydrogen contamination can occur post-production, leaving officials unsure at this point exactly when hydrogen was introduced into the steel.
EO Jeff Liter said Vegas Fastener represents “a major advancement in EFG’s goal to become the premier North American supplier of specialty fasteners”. Founded in 1998, the Las Vegas based manufacturer operates forging presses, computer controlled turning centers, vertical CNC mills and CNC bar feeders. Customers include power generation, marine/naval transportation,
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