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Heard a foreman bragging about skipping flange bolt torque checks
I was grabbing coffee near the site office and heard this foreman telling his buddy he skips the final bolt torque check on flanges to save time. Said something like 'if it feels tight, it is tight.' That's how you get a flange leak or worse, a steam burn. Has anyone else seen guys cutting corners like this on pressure vessels?
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the_vera4mo ago
Tight is tight enough, right? I mean, how many flanges actually fail from a missing torque check in the real world? It's like a 1 in 10,000 chance and the foreman is probably saving the crew hours of boring work. If the bolts feel snug by hand and the gasket is compressed, what's the big deal? The pipe fitters I know have been doing this for decades and never had a catastrophic leak. Pressure vessels are built tough, they can handle a little under-torque. Sometimes you gotta trust the feel over a spec sheet written by some engineer who never turned a wrench.
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the_angela4mo ago
Have you actually seen what happens when a flange lets go on a high pressure steam line, @the_vera? I've been on two callouts where the root cause was bolts that felt "snug enough" by hand but weren't evenly torqued, and the gasket blew out hard enough to take a chunk out of the pipe. Those pipe fitters with decades of experience are probably just lucky, not right, and the one time it does fail it's a lot more than a boring hour of paperwork.
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