[TheForge] trade secrets

[David E. Smucker]

On an industrial front trade secrets are very much alive and very much 
guarded.  Why have trade secrets vs. patents?  Well with patents you have to 
disclose a lot of information -- in many cases enough information that some 
one else can get around your patent -- especially as it comes to 
manufacturing process.

Let me give you an example from my old day job.  Cold rolling of aluminum 
with water based coolants.  Aluminum and water don't do well together if the 
water is trapped between wraps of metal in a coil.  The water causes very 
bad stains.  Yet it is very desirable to roll with water rather than mineral 
oil because of the high amount of heat removal with water vs. oil.
Starting back in the 1950's Alcoa learned how to do this by the use of 
special additives to the water / oil mixture and methods to remove all of 
the coolant (mixture) as the metal leaves the roll bite.

Now I know the technical details of how to remove all of the coolant as the 
metal leaves the roll bite but not the technical details of the chemistry of 
the rolling coolant mixture.  I'm retired and still get a good pension from 
Alcoa and I am not about to "sell" this information but even if I was, you 
still would have only half of the story.  The other part of this is that you 
have to be ready to deal with all of the pain of the process.  When it 
works, great, but if things go wrong you have tons of scrap and very upset 
customers to deal with.  So you might get close to having the trade secrets 
but not the depth to deal with the problems.  I am sure that things are 
similar in many other fields or companies.

Dave Smucker

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <schade at acegroup.cc>
To: "Sponsored by ABANA" <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2006 2:22 PM
Subject: [TheForge] trade secrets


>I was wondering what kinds of things that we talk about here every day 
>might have been considered "trade secrets" at some time.
>
> Are there still trade secrets? Would we know if there were?
>
> Bob
>
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