[bugzpulverizer]

Has anyone heard of, or used the Meta-Lax Stress relieving system? From what I understand it uses vibrations to stress relieve a part instead of doing it thermally. If anyone has any experience or info I would really appreciate hearing about it. Thanks in advance.

[Tony Montana]

Hot Rod or maybe Popular Hot Rodding had an article on it a few years back. It sounded really cool. They were stress relieving blocks, cranks, etc before and after machining and seeing big improvements in durabilty and power output. Sorry I don't have more info than that; you might try searching for it on their websites.

[jptech]

Has anyone heard of, or used the Meta-Lax Stress relieving system? From what I understand it uses vibrations to stress relieve a part instead of doing it thermally. If anyone has any experience or info I would really appreciate hearing about it. Thanks in advance.

The company that I used to work for had a Meta-Lax unit, and we used it to stress relieve plastic injection molds. I also used it for weld conditioning (while welding). It is fantastic! For stress relieving, you can run a scan before and after the process, and plot the results- you can actually see it on the plots. For weld conditioning, you can weld with little, or no distortion. It also doesn't take as long as heating something up, then waiting for it to cool down! Hope this helps!-----------------john

[RICHARD ZASTROW]

Vibratory stress relieving actually does relieve stresses. My problem is that it doesn't normalize the heat effected area that may require later machining. For that reason, my applications are thermally stress relieved and normalized.

If the object doesn't require subsequent machining, the shake, rattle and roll method is probably fine.

Dick Z

[bklauba]

Often, vibratory stress relief is used as a prep for machining. When comparing it to PWHT / TSR, be careful to to over-attribute benefits of PWHT, which seems to often occur when the workpieces are low-C stl weldments. PWHT is often attributed with softening the HAZ's of such, but not so, for two reasons:

1. Unless improperly done, such parts typically do not have very hard spots.
2. Unless you go to an annealing temp, little / no softening or really any metallurgical change takes place.

The chief problem with the Metalax gear appears its propensity to produce false positives, i.e., it indicates it has stress relieved, when it has not, due to the lack of good speed regulation in the motor control circuit, which systematically produces what would appear to be a resonance peak shift when none has really occurred.