Since its foundation in 1985, the Engineering Integrity Society has made an important contribution to engineering science by providing a forum for academic and industrial engineers to exchange ideas, knowledge, and experience.

The EIS has been organising international conferences for more than 30 years. Fatigue 2017 was held in Downing College Cambridge on 1 to 3 July 2017 and was the seventh in our series of major conferences. We brought the international fatigue and durability community together to share knowledge, and understand the challenges, in using high performance materials for reliable and cost effective products.

Fatigue 2017 built on our previous fatigue conferences by exploring the emergence of modern manufacturing processes and the impact these have on the mechanical properties of the materials themselves right through to the performance of the final components. This complex interplay between materials and their processing, advanced manufacturing methods, and the subsequent durability and reliability of the products formed a dominant theme throughout the conference. The nine papers in this Special Issue have been selected as they address many of these important questions.

The EIS is a registered charity and one of our aims is to encourage young people to enter and stay in the engineering profession. We are pleased that one fifth of the papers at Fatigue 2017 were written and presented by early career engineers and were eligible for the Peter Watson Prize. This is awarded annually in memory of our Founding President who was a great supporter of our fatigue conferences. The winner of the Peter Watson Prize was Eimear O'Hara, and her paper on low cycle fatigue of a new precipitate strengthened martensitic steel is a worthy inclusion in this Special Issue. Anke Schmiedt was Highly Commended for her paper, also included in this Special Issue, in which she investigated the corrosion fatigue of brazed joints in exhaust gas condensate.

The EIS is pleased to be able to bring the work of scientists and engineers working on important problems of fatigue and durability to the wider engineering research community through this Special Issue dedicated to the influence of manufacturing to fatigue properties and design.

As Guest Editors of this Special Issue, we are satisfied of the final result and hope that the present papers could be useful to researchers, designers, and colleagues who are involved in different aspects of design and investigation, using traditional and new materials.

We would like to thank all the authors for their important contribution and all the reviewers for their efforts that are fundamental in the dissemination of the scientific finding. Sincere thanks also to Prof Hong Youshi, the Editor-in-Chief of this international journal, who helped and supported us with patience, and to all the FFEMS staff for the valuable, priceless, and inexhaustible contribution.