Fortunate to be in Lancashire, until recently the go-to part of the UK for aircraft engineering and home of the most renowned bombers of the Second and Cold wars in the shape Avro's Lancaster and Vulcan. Been having trouble finding people to bend aluminium, want upturns on my skids as I do, and it is here talking to a man who does it for a living that I find out why. Unlike steel or copper, it's not especially ductile and prone to brittle hardening as a result of both age and work. Also, the grade is a factor that is not nearly so forgiving as the range of grades of those previously quoted metal types. As a consequence, looking at the samples here and the right-most especially, you will see that the same batch has in one case been successfully bent through ninety degrees whilst another has failed at thirty.
Reflecting upon this I drive east into Yorkshire to take a look at the "Five Rise" series of canal locks on the Leeds-Liverpool canal in Bingley ~ built in 1774 and raising barges through sixty feet along the course of three hundred feet ever since.
They don't build them like that any more ~ and that's the engineers were talking about.
