RK: What you say is true and it is interesting. I remember when I was able to spend a fair amount of time on the production floor with Apollo a number of years ago, we were talking about seamless vs welded tubing. Their engineers confided that while they were glad that the market at that time seemed to view seamless tubing as being more accurate for shaft making because of the little changes in the welded tubes from the actual welding and heat treatment and material properties as you mentioned, they were glad that the industry did not know the little "problems" that they faced daily with working with seamless tubing. They admitted that piercing and drawing the seamless blanks was never as accurate on wall thickness as was welding a coiled strip. So while they did not have the little changes in the tube from the welding, TT and RP did not have the wall thickness problems to deal with that Apollo did.
Tom,
Very interesting, but not new information. I first found out years ago that the Apollo "seamless" marketing pitch was overhype, from the 1992 book, "The Modern Guide to Shaft Fitting". Now let me see -- who wrote that book anyway? Oh yeah! Tom Wishon and Jeff Summitt. Hmmm!
Chart 4-3 from that book says it very explicitly. The chart is a "rotational comparison of frequency"; nobody used the word "spine" back then. The seamless steel Apollo shafts were not quite as good as the welded steel True Temper shafts -- though none of the samples from either company were over 3cpm difference.
So was that when you visited Apollo?
Cheers! DaveT
