Preface

John Schey asked me to work with him on this book in 2000. As the book is a recognized essential resource for researchers in the fields of manufacturing tribology and metal forming, I excitedly accepted the offer, but first needed to finish a few projects. Sadly, his health deteriorated, and he passed away before we could work together on the second edition.

John and I had grown to be great friends. One summer, when I visited my Austrian relatives, I happened to visit a Hungarian city near the border called Sopron. When John heard this, and I showed him photos of the Firewatch Tower in the city center, he relayed to me that this was his home town, and in his childhood he used to run and play in the streets shown in the images. He looked long and hard at those images of Sopron. I learned that he was a young man when the Soviet troops invaded Hungary, and he led his pregnant wife, Gitta, through the nearby forest, carefully avoiding guards, and snuck across the border into Austria. He had never been to his childhood home since.

But he built an incredible life in Germany, the United States, and then Canada. A prolific author, researcher, and teacher, he was a major influence on the manufacturing sector right up to his death. He was everyone’s friend, with a singular intellect. The engineering profession is well-aware of his scientific publications, but I don’t know of any other engineering professors who wrote operas, and I know of only a few that wrote novels. John did this and more.

Around 2016, I contributed a chapter on Manufacturing Tribology to an ASM handbook, and the editor, Karen Marken, asked me if I had ever heard of John’s book, Tribology in Metalworking. She then asked if I would be interested in updating the book. I agreed to the project, but had to wait for my tour of duty at the National Science Foundation to end.

The first edition of Tribology in Metalworking is an amazing reference. Because of John’s unique background and linguistic skills, he was able to collect, read and understand the technical literature in Hungarian, English, Russian, French, and German. Those who have seen the first edition know that he documented his writing thoroughly. I have attempted to follow his practice - there are very many references to the modern technical literature in this revision. However, I knew that the first edition successfully captured the state of research and practice as it existed in the early 1980s; I therefore could rely on the first edition and build upon that foundation, using literature from the 1990s onward. I have preserved very few of the references to earlier research; readers interested in the historical legacy of metal forming tribology will need to refer to John’s first edition.

I had some tools that John did not have, which made my job much easier than his in writing the first edition. First of all, I had the Internet, and on-line libraries, instantly providing me with whatever publications I desired. Also, in the 1990s, a series of conferences dedicated to the topic, the International Conferences on Tribology in Manufacturing, started taking place, providing an outstanding forum for in-depth discussion and presentation of the best research in the field. I also had the papers by W.R.D. Wilson, N. Bay, K. Dohda, J. Jeswiet, P. Groche, A. Azushima, H. Saiki, and many more researchers who transformed the field into a truly scientific endeavor. I also had John’s organization, which was mostly followed in this edition. I also had his original text, expertly edited by his wife, Gitta.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have him as a co-worker.