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That time I spent 2 years grinding welds the wrong way at the Mobil plant in Joliet
I used to always grind perpendicular to the bead because my first foreman told me it looked cleaner. Then a QC guy from Chicago Boilermakers Local 1 pulled me aside and showed me how grinding parallel actually blends the HAZ better and reduces stress risers. He pointed to a cracked repair on a drum that had been ground the way I was doing it. Has anyone else had a basic habit that turned out to be totally backwards?
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johnson.eva3d ago
Wiping your ass before you take the dump" has me dead, that's exactly what it felt like looking back. But wait, your foreman was a pipefitter? That explains so much about how the wrong info gets passed down. Those guys mean well but they come from a totally different world. I had a similar thing where this old timer kept telling me to run my beads cold and slow. Turned out he learned on stick and never adapted to wire feed. Whole crew wasted months because nobody questioned the guy with the gray beard.
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matthewking3d ago
Grinding perpendicular? That's like wiping your ass before you take the dump. I spent a whole summer on a tank farm in Gary doing it the wrong way too, and my welds looked like a dog chewed on them. QC guy walked by once and just laughed, didn't even say anything, just pointed at my grinder and shook his head. Found out later my foreman was a pipefitter who never touched a TIG torch in his life. Still get mad thinking about the 200 hours I wasted making pretty lines that looked like crap underneath.
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wesley6393d ago
Tank farm in Gary explains a lot actually. That place has more bad habits floating around than good ones. Folks learn one way from some guy who learned it wrong twenty years ago and it just keeps getting passed down like a family heirloom nobody asked for.
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