New Oil Aids Production of Low-Alloy Steels.--Gulf Oil Corporation technologists have developed a quenching oil which aids war production of low-alloy steels and which is helping to offset the shortage of alloys, most of which are imported. As applied to many types and shapes of steels, it has shown spectacular effects. With a cooling speed more nearly approaching that of water through the higher temperature range, this product improved physical properties in most of the steels that were tested. Yet it retained the minimum tendency toward distortion and cracking that is characteristic of all quenching oils. To check and double check the new product, test after test was carried out on equipment especially developed for the purpose at the Gulf Research and Development Company's Laboratory near Pittsburgh. This utilizes a highly sensitive oscillograph to measure the change in the electromotive force of a thermocouple in the steel as it is being quenched. A photographic record of the movement of the oscillograph is made on a sensitized tape, which is driven by a motor through a camera at a rate of six inches per second. From this tape the temperature change in the steel during any interval of one two-hundredth of a second can be determined. Gulf's researchers found that where ordinary quenching oils will always achieve the desired hardness in heat treating a steel of a given specification and where water was being used without distortion or cracking there appears to be no reason for using this new super-quench oil. But between these two extremes, there were hundreds of applications involving all kinds of alloy and plain carbon steels where the new product would prove superior to any other known quenching medium. According to a Gulf technologist, the new oil promises to save thousands of tons of critically scarce alloys that go into certain kinds of steel now in abnormally great demand for war material. In the past it has been necessary to increase the alloy content of steel to get the desired physical properties because of the limitations of the quenching oils. Now these alloys are scarce. By using the new product metallurgists have found it possible, in many cases, to get the same hardness and toughness in steels containing lesser amounts of vital alloying elements. R. H. O.