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Can we talk about the old boilermaker in Gary who made me redo a tube sheet layout 3 times
I was on a shutdown in Gary about 2 years back and this older guy named Walt kept watching me lay out my tube sheet without saying much. After my third pass he walked over, put his hand on the template, and asked me if I had checked my reference edge against the shell datum yet. I hadn't, and when I did the whole pattern was off by about 3/16 across the bundle. He didn't yell or anything, just said the datum is the only thing on the job that never lies. Any of you still do a datum check before you punch your first hole, or is that just an old timer thing?
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clark.lily20d ago
That line about the datum being the only thing on the job that never lies really hits home, and I feel for you on redoing that layout three times. I've had older guys do the same thing to me, just standing there quiet while I messed up, and it stings way more than getting yelled at because you know they were right the whole time. A 3/16 drift across a whole bundle is no joke either, that's a lot of holes in the wrong place and a lot of reaming you don't get back. I still check my reference edge against the datum before I punch anything, mostly because the one time I skipped it the foreman caught it and I never heard the end of it. That habit sticks with you once somebody like Walt burns it into your head.
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