Reading wear: crazing, washout, abrasion, adhesive pickup, plastic deformation

Five wear modes, one visual signature each, and the rules that keep heat check from getting called mechanical fatigue and washout from getting called plastic deformation.

9 min readLesson 8 of 13

Knowledge check

A closed-die forge die pulled at 55K hits shows three separate features on the working face. A dense fine-network of shallow cracks across the high-heat region, a smooth eroded valley running from the gate toward the flash land, and a single 4 mm crack running perpendicular to material flow at an inside corner. Name each mode, give the root cause for each, and say which one drives the pull-now decision.