Whatever happened to QQ-P-35, Passivation Treatments for Corrosion Resistant Steel?

QQ-P-35, “Passivation Treatments for Corrosion Resistant Steel,” is another government document that was cancelled due to the implementation of the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act in the mid-1990’s.  The public law, known as NTTAA, directs Federal Agencies to use technical standards “that are developed or adopted by voluntary consensus standards bodies.”  Since QQ-P-35 was a Federal Specification it was an obvious candidate for replacement with a U.S. industry standard.

QQ-P-35 was originally issued in July 1963.  Revision C from 1988 was withdrawn by Cancellation Notice 3 on 9/11/1998.  The Cancellation Notice specifies that QQ-P-35 can be replaced by both ASTM A967 and AMS QQ-P-35.  This shows the use of two types of replacement documents:  1) a pre-existing standard (ASTM A967) and 2) a standard that is a republication of the withdrawn government to migrate the caretaking of the standard from a government organization to an industry one (AMS QQ-P-35).

The other interesting point about this particular superseding history is that seven years after the AMS republication of the specification, the document (AMS QQ-P-35) was itself cancelled in favor of another AMS standard, AMS 2700.  This actually was possible because of government participation in the committee that writes the AMS 2700 standard.  With the publication of Revision B in February 2004, issues in the previous edition of the document that made it unsuitable for government usage were resolved.  Thus the final migration to an industry standard was made possible.

So now, the current replacements for QQ-P-35 are the ASTM A967, “Standard Specification for Chemical Passivation Treatments for Stainless Steel Parts,” and AMS 2700, “Passivation of Corrosion Resistant Steels.”

In actuality, the number of government documents that were republished in this way in order to facilitate migration to industry-sponsored standards is relatively small.  It was certainly made possible because the federal level government documentation is not covered by copyright.  And by this time, many of those republications have been revised or withdrawn as well.

Should you have an obsolete document and need to know what it was replaced by, contact Document Center staff by phone (650-591-7600), fax (650-591-7617) or email (info@document-center.com).  We’ve been keeping records on standards since 1982 and for many items, our history information goes back much further.

All current Federal Specifications can be purchased at our website, www.document-center.com.  Many obsolete revisions are available, along with the documents that have replaced them.