In the olden days, the Navy had an NSN (National Stock Number) for an "O" ring kit. It came in a wonderful maple box with chrome trim and finger spliced corners. It contained a vulcanizing iron with grooves for a number of ring diameters. The Nitral material came on rolls with another NSN for each size. The test for an "O" ring was to pull on it until it failed. So to determine if the liquid goop that joined the ring ends was still young enough to use, you would make a test ring. Put on the goop, clamp it in the iron and cook it. Then let it cool and pull it apart. It should fail at a location other than the joint. If that was the case, you built your new ring in the correct diameter and completed repairs.

 

That kit was superseded by a kit that had just the rolls of material and a tube of super glue. The same rule applied as far as a test piece was concerned. The new kit was in a sturdy cardboard box. We thought that consumption would die off on the older kit in the wood box, but it didn't, it went up. The original kit cost us $2,000.00 each. The new kit cost about $200.00. So the savings we should have seen did not materialize.

 

So I called some of the users to see why they wanted both kits and kept ordering the old one. Like the punch line to a joke.......We like the box. They kept the rolls of material and the wooden box. discarded the iron. and put the new kit in the old box. They had a place for that box on submarines, and the cardboard box was a hair too big to fit the space. Other folks liked the box and used it for other kits, to get out of having anything cardboard in the flyaway kits or whatever they were doing. So people ordered a $2,000.00 "O" ring kit to get the box, and some of them just pitched the kit. So, we established an NSN for the box. We killed the NSN for the old kit and sent the new kit, in the same box as the old kit. We placed an automated message for anyone who ordered the kit, to suggest that if it was just the box they wanted, then order this NSN for just the box.  Then we saw the savings we were after. "O" rings are at once simple and complex.

 

Things are seldom as they appear.

Sitting on high in Crystal Palace speculating as to the reasons for this and that, is of no value.

It is the horses mouth that tells the tail...

 

Lynn E. Hanover   

 

 

Lynn,

If it wasn't for Kelly, with my encouragement, as I was trying to establish the correct sizes from Australia at the time, the correct sizes would never have been identified as, 'you know who' was preaching his usual, 'he who is always right sermon' about the sizes. As far as I know those sizes ( the wrong ones) are still being bandied about even though I supplied the correct sizes to him, for the benefit of other builders.