Old 03-27-08 | 01:22 PM
  #7  
Niles H.
eternalvoyage
 
Joined: Feb 2007
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Originally Posted by Scooper
...Aluminum and magnesium don't exhibit an endurance limit, meaning that even with a miniscule load, they will eventually fail after enough load cycles.[/B][/I]
This claim appears again and again, and [I hope I may be forgiven for pointing this out] it is false.

If you had a mosquito [even a heavy one] jumping up and down on a sturdy, thick aluminum frame [a Santa Cruz Bullet, for example], the frame would not reach its fatigue limit in your lifetime, my lifetime, or all of our lifetimes put together, or within any other reasonable time frame -- and not within most wildly unreasonable time frames.

[Perhaps there is a metallurgist out there who could tell us when and how failure might eventually occur -- I suspect that these materials slowly degrade or decay over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Assuming an immortal mosquito, I doubt if its many millennia of activities would be the primary cause of the failure.]
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