Loading…
15
Serious question, did old boiler jobs really get laid out better 30 years back?
My uncle welded on a big recovery boiler in Baton Rouge back in the late 80s and he still says every tube got a number and a spot before anyone lit a torch. He pulled out an old drawing last weekend, every run chalked and tagged on the floor, we just eyeball it off a print now. I did a bank of generating tubes in 3 days at 38 feet up, felt like guesswork half the thing. He thinks the planning was the whole job back then. How do you all handle layout now, are you cutting tags for every tube or just working off the print?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
matthewross14d ago
My old foreman carried a roll of masking tape in his pouch every single day and tagged every tube in the bank before we touched a torch, must have been 200 tags on one job in Texas City. That tagging step is what your uncle is really talking about, the layout guy walked the floor and marked each run so the welders never had to stop and read a print 40 feet up. When you skip that and just work off the drawing, every fitter ends up solving the same puzzle alone and you get tubes fighting each other at the header. Cutting tags takes maybe a day of one guy's time on a big bank, and it saves that back ten times over in rework and grinding. The old timers weren't smarter than us, they just knew a print in your hand up on a scaffold is useless compared to a mark on the steel.
1