Light Metals Influence Design and Legality
Page 18
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THE important role of aluminium in passengervehicle construction, and the economic benefits resulting from the displacement of heavy metals by light alloys in this connection, are now widely recognized and appreciated. Nevertheless, even those most conversant with the issues at stake may be excused if, at first, the full implications of the temporary restrictions now governing the use of light metals for "civilian" purposes were not immediately understood.
The real posture of affairs soon became apparent, however, and, in consequence, the Public Service Transport Association appealed to the Minister of Transport, requesting that the current regulations regarding the maximum laden weight of buses and trolleybuses might be waived.
It was pointed out that, as a result of the use of heavy metals in place of aluminium, it would be possible to keep within the prescribed limits only by reducing seating capacity, a course which, could not, in the national interest, be justified.
The urgency of this representation was at once recognized ; the Minister of ,Transport proposes to amend the appropriate regulations in so far as they apply to buses, and, for vehicles registered for the first time on November 1, 1939, and subsequent to that date, an additional 10 cwt. will be allowed in respect of maximum permissible laden weight and axle weight.
From these facts it emerges clearly that aluminium is not only intimately linked with the purely engineering aspect of passenger transport, but also exerts a considerable influence on its operation as a unit in the country's economic and social structure.
The present rigid control of light metals as materials essential to the building up and maintenance of an efficient machinery of war, is indubitably justifiable, but cnly to this extent, that as soon as a reliable fr recast can be made of future trends, then restriction must to some degree be relinquished.
The flexibility of our own system of regulations has been amply demonstrated ; aluminium supplies are diverted into special channels, so the law is modified to make good the deficiency. It is less easy, however, to fulfil foreign orders on such an elastic basis, and quite impossible to call back, in company with resurrected engine designs, the fuels of pre-light-metal days.
Only now, in the present emergency, has the part played by aluminium in the country's transport organization been revealed in its fullest extent. A novelist once showed how the suicide of a brassbutton manufacturer in Birmingham precipitated a civil war in the Congo. It is no exaggeration to say that the seating accommodation in our buses may be seriously affected by any difficulties in the shipment of bauxite and cryolite, and the speed with which larger extraction units for the production of aluminium can be laid down and put into operation.