This article discusses fractures and cracks due to ancient artifact weaknesses. It provides several case studies to aid the appreciation of fractography as a diagnostic technique and to understand the importance of cracking. These case histories concern ancient gold and silver alloys, bronzes, and wrought irons. The article considers the applicabilities of fractography, metallography, and chemical analyses in answering archaeological and archaeometallurgical questions. The article also discusses the restoration and conservation of corroded and embrittled artifacts, including the use of coatings.

A sliding bearing (plain bearing) is a machine element designed to transmit loads or reaction forces to a shaft that rotates relative to the bearing. This article discusses the properties of bearing materials. It provides information on bearing material systems: single-metal systems, bimetal systems, and trimetal systems. The article describes the designations, nominal compositions, mechanical properties, and applications of various sliding bearing alloys: tin-base alloys, lead-base alloys, copper-base alloys, aluminum-base alloys, silver-base alloys, zinc-base alloys, additional metallic materials, nonmetallic materials. It describes casting processes, powder metallurgy processes, and electroplating processes. The article also discusses the selection criteria for bearing materials.

This article describes the annealing behavior of precious metals, namely, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, ruthenium, and osmium. It discusses the annealing practices and their effect on the basic properties of common precious metal alloys. The article presents the typical properties and compositions of silver-copper alloys and gold jewelry alloys such as colored gold alloys and white gold alloys.

The corrosion processes of metals during burial are affected by environmental pollutants, other archaeological material, geography, microorganisms in the soil, vegetation, land use, soil chemistry, soil physical properties, and the presence or absence of water and air. This article discusses the key environmental variables that affect the corrosion of buried metal artifacts. These include water (including dissolved salts and gases), sulfate-reducing bacteria, pH (acidity), and potential (oxidizing or reducing capacity). The article contains tables that list some corrosion products identified on archaeological tin and pewter, lead, iron alloys, silver alloys, and copper alloys. It also discusses the corrosion problems after excavation and the techniques followed by archaeological department for conserving metal artifacts.

This article discusses the definitions, classifications, structural features, vapor pressure values, corrosion inhibition mechanisms, and methods of evaluation of vapor-phase-corrosion inhibitors or volatile corrosion inhibitors (VCIs). Practical methods of using VCIs for corrosion protection of aluminum, ferrous, and nonferrous alloys are discussed with specific examples. The article contains tables that summarize the applications of different VCIs used for protecting ferrous metals, copper and its alloys, and silver.

This article presents an overview of resistance brazing (RB) used for many applications involving small workpieces, for small joints that are part of very large equipment, or for low-volume production runs. It lists the advantages and limitations of RB and outlines the factors that contribute to high quality in an RB joint. The article discusses the classification of RB such as manual RB or automatic RB. It describes the selection of metal electrodes and filler metals for RB. The filler metals include silver alloys, aluminum-silicon alloys, and copper-phosphorus alloys.