the_wyatt•2mo agoProlific Poster

Serious question, do people not check their electrode ovens anymore?

I was on a turnaround in Gary, and I saw a guy grab a fresh pack of 7018 right out of the delivery box without letting it sit in the oven. He said his welds 'looked fine' last week, but I could see the moisture issues in the slag as he worked. How many of you still bake your rods before a critical weld?

3 comments

3 Comments

cole_patel416d ago

Man, it's crazy how much we just assume things are fine without actually checking. I mean, I see this everywhere, not just on the job. People skip the little steps because they're in a hurry or they've done it a thousand times before. That rod oven thing is a perfect example, you get comfortable and start thinking you can eyeball it. But those little shortcuts add up, and then you got a big problem that takes way longer to fix than just doing it right the first time. Idk, maybe it's just me but I feel like we've lost the habit of double checking the basics. It's like we'd rather trust our memory than just look at the dial.

black.mark2mo ago

That's wild, I saw the same thing on a tank project last year. The foreman let guys skip the oven for non-structural stuff and we ended up with porosity in three separate seams. What's the actual procedure at your site for checking oven temps and rod logs?

gibson.robert2mo ago

Yeah, that's a scary sight. @black.mark is right about it leading to real problems. Watched a guy on a pipe rack skip the oven for what he called a 'quick patch', and the UT found a line of porosity you could see from three feet away. Our procedure says oven logs get checked at shift start, but nobody does it unless the QA guy is breathing down your neck.