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Two guys on my crew argue about tube rolling order and I want to know who's right
I work on a crew out of Baton Rouge and we got into it last week over whether you should roll the tubes from the center out or work your way around the tube sheet in order. My foreman swears by starting in the middle and spiraling out because it keeps the stress even, and he's been doing this 22 years so nobody argues with him out loud. But the new guy we hired from a shop in Corpus says his old lead always went row by row top to bottom and never had a leak test fail. We rolled 400 tubes on a small HRSG job and passed hydro the first time, so both methods technically worked that day. Thing is I've seen a tube sheet bow on a 3 pass exchanger because a guy rushed the outer rows and the middle stayed loose. Other side of it is going center out means you're reaching over wet rolling lube half the day and my wrists were shot by Tuesday. So what's the actual rule here, is it just whatever the engineer on the job wants, or is one of these really better for tube sheet life? Looking for anyone who's had a leak come back on them and what they traced it to.
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pipera5023d ago
Sounds like both crews got lucky on a small job and now they think their way is gospel. Torque and lubricant matter way more than the path you take, and if a tube sheet bowed it was probably a bad sequence combined with rushing, not the layout itself. Ask your foreman if he's ever done a head-to-head test with the same lube and torque on both, because I'd bet money the difference washes out.
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