TABLE OF CONTENTS 
The Khafji rig disaster. (Image courtesy of Thomas Brinsko with Bic Alliance Magazine.)
Some people are better at multi-tasking than others. The good ones should feel at home in manufacturing. Shaping, finishing and assembling components into products to meet the technical, economic and aesthetic expectations of consumers today requires the balancing of many priorities. Earlier chapters have introduced intrinsic properties strength, resistivity and so on that depend intimately on microstructure, and microstructure depends on processing. Microstructure is not accessible to observation during processing, so controlling it requires the ability to predict how a given process step will cause it to evolve or change. So manufacturers have their work cut out to turn materials reliably into good-quality products, while making themselves a decent profit. Manufacturing involves more than making materials into the right shapes and sticking them together; it is also responsible for producing properties on target.
There is a parallel with cooking. The recipe lists the ingredients and cooking instructions: how to mix, beat, heat, finish and present the dish. A good cook draws on experience (and creativity) to create new dishes with pleasing flavor, consistency and appearance; you might think of these as the attributes of the dish. But if the dish is not a success the first thing the cook might do is to cut right through it and examine what went wrong with its microstructure. Suppose, for instance, the dish is a fruit cake, then the distribution of porosity and fruit constitute aspects of...
