While working for Ameron Pipe, I got a call from the installation contractor
telling me that the bolts supplied for the 36" flanges simply would not work. I
drove to the job site to see what the problem was. They were grade 8 bolts and
nuts, 1" diameter. They had tried almost half a barrel of the bolts, and ruined
them all. The bolts were metric and the nuts were SAE.

I wondered how smart you have to be to keep trying to thread bolts and nuts from
the same barrels together before you figure out that they are all the same and
none are going to work.

And then... Edison wanted to revamp the piping in the San Onofre nuke plant, and
they wanted to do it cheap. So they contracted with Mitsubishi to fabricate it
offshore. This work had previously been done by American Boilermakers, and it
was always successful. But not this time. Hundreds of millions of dollars were
wasted because there is turbulence causing premature wear inside the pipes.
Edison wanted to sue Mitsubishi, but Mitsubishi has an ironclad case. They built
it exactly according to specs supplied by Edison. Rather than commit more
hundreds of millions into doing it right, they closed down the nuke plant.
Decommissioning this plant will cost many billions.

When I was working construction I saw a lot of horrible mistakes. These are not
at all rare.

On Sep 17, 2014, at 3:19 AM, David Nighswander  wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> Snip
> From: Chuck Ramsey
> 
> 
> How could someone (anyone?)not notice in 2 1/2 years of construction that
something just didn't look right?  But then Frank reminded meof the Mars mission
that crashed a lander into the surface of the planet.  An ounce of prevention is
worth 0.4536 kg of cure.  We humans...ain't we a kick. chuck
> Unsnip
> 
> So true Chuck. Negotiations sometimes end up with a compromise that suits the
negotiators but is less than satisfactory in the real world.
> In a previous life I was the engineer in charge of writing assembly
instructions for heavy equipment components. We bid on a 80/20 project in
support of a supplier who was tooling up for increased production but couldn’t
meet the current demand. We were to be the 20% supplier involving one group of
components.
> I went with a crew down to the current suppliers plant to gather information
for assembly instructions and to train the welders on the assembly.
> The customer had supplied prints to the Project Manager who ordered parts. One
of the parts was an access port on the side of a tank. After the crew assembled
the first tank they sent it over for leak testing. Following the assembly prints
supplied by the customer and the assembly instructions they tried bolting on the
blank plate made for testing the tanks integrity under 15 psi. The 3/8” fine
thread bolts would only thread in about 1/2” and then hung up. The tester got a
3/8” fine thread tap and chased the threads. The tank passed. It was assembled,
painted, and ready to be shipped.
> I stopped out and talked to the crew and the tester walked over to complain
about the screwed up threads in the access port. Knowing that the chances of all
8 threaded holes being damaged at 1/2” deep were pretty slim I stopped the
assembly process and started chasing prints.
> The set that the Project Manager had ordered the parts from were a set from
the customers engineering department. The access port had not been converted to
English inches like the rest of the assembly had 5 years previously. When the
supplier was making the tank they just knew that they were supposed to be 3/8”
fine thread and made them that way.
> The company had bid and bought materials based on the prints given so the
project had a hermaphrodite tank assembly. After consultation at a much higher
level than I was used to, the first 40 units were shipped with metric bolts.
> Doesn't sound like a problem until in the field someone tries to work on one
of the oddball tanks and taps out what appears to be damaged thread. Tapping the
holes to 3/8” will hold 15 psi. I never heard any complaints but I know in the
field the operations that ran this equipment used automatic fill systems to fill
the tanks through an auto shutoff  that stopped when it hit 50 psi of back press
ure.------------------------------------------------------------------------
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