A 25-year boilermaker told me to stop grinding my welds smooth on pressure vessels

He said the inspector will fail it if the cap looks ground down because they can't tell if you fixed a crack, and now I'm wondering how many of my old jobs passed because nobody checked close enough - has anyone else had a foreman tell them to leave the bead alone?

2 comments

2 Comments

matthewf404d ago

My old foreman on the Gulf would tell us the same thing about Code vessels. I've seen inspectors fail a cap that was smoothed over because they couldn't verify the weld profile was sound underneath.

matthew_reed5023h ago

Man, that brings back something that happened to a buddy of mine down in Texas. He was welding on a code vessel and the QA guy came over, saw his cap ground smooth, and just shook his head. Told him they'd flag it because they can't tell if he was hiding a repair, just like @matthewf40 said. My buddy ended up having to redo the whole weld with the cap left on, and the inspector passed it no problem. So yeah, I'd say you probably got lucky on a few of those old jobs, but it's better to find out now than later, because that kind of stuff can get real expensive real fast.