<VV> Viton at NASA - not much Corvair

[Bryan Blackwell]

FYI, the SRBs certainly did use Viton, and Dr. Feynman famously demo'd  
that it's not elastic enough in below freezing temps, which the  
shuttle saw the night before the crash.  The crash has been pretty  
conclusively shown to have been caused by temperature related failure  
of the Viton o-rings coupled with flexing of the booster joints on  
liftoff.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
http://www.fotuva.org/online/frameload.htm?/online/challenger.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAi_9quzUY

Now, a Corvair doesn't have the same requirements as a shuttle  
booster.  The Viton is effective in our relatively stationary joints,  
versus a booster joint that sees enough pressure to throw a shuttle  
into orbit and actually bows the aluminum case out on ignition.

If you'd like a good read, you can go to my site and search for  
Classic Feynman and get a copy from Amazon.  It includes a CD of one  
of his lectures about his experiences on the Manhattan Project.

--Bryan

Bryan Blackwell bryan at skiblack.com
http://autoxer.skiblack.com/
  Corvairs: '62 700 Wagon, '64 Greenbrier, '65 Corsa, '66 Corsa
  '69 Road Runner, '09 Ford F-150, '99 Neon R/T
"Why do something if you're not going to obsess about it?"



On Sep 27, 2009, at 8:30 PM, jvhroberts at aol.com wrote:

> Not sure if the SRBs used Viton, but it wasn't cold enough for any  
> of the commercially available formulations to fail based solely on  
> material properties.