ASM Regional Officers Conf. – Calgary, Canada

ASM International is a professional society for those in materials science and related industries. The six chapters that comprise the NW region gather annually to compare notes, share programming ideas, and build community. This year’s NW regional officer’s conference was held in Calgary, AB, Canada. It’s a tradition in Calgary to give visitors white cowboy hats from the annual Calgary Stampede – this photo shows the conference participants with our hats on. Fun.

 In between talks, we took half a day to visit a private museum, the Canadian Museum of Making – a collection of forging and machining equipment and artifacts, complete with a blacksmithing demonstration (http://museumofmaking.com/). The full-time, working blacksmith on site provided a guided tour of the shop and museum.

 Here is the blacksmith, Japheth, forging together two leaf-shaped pieces of steel.

All the tools are hand-forged in the shop.

 This is a view of the back of the forge – many pairs of tongs and assorted handmade tools are seen hanging from the back of the forge.

 This old steam hammer is used for forging large pieces.

An assortment of handmade tools for forging.

This anvil was forged from many, many small pieces of scrap!

 In the museum, a steam engine, originally from a textile mill in England, was setup in fully restored condition.

Here I am in front of a steam engine outside the museum.

And here’s the whole group in front of an old oil-drilling rig outside the museum.

Dr. Laurie Collins, director of R&D at Evraz Steel, gave a talk to the group about advances in energy pipeline steels. He was also presented with a white hat 🙂

His talk centered on microalloying to increase toughness and weldability of X100 pipeline steel.

Report written by Mattea Brown, E.I.T.