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Why does nobody talk about how a 62 year old boilermaker in Baton Rouge changed my whole tube prep game
Two summers back I was working a turnaround outside Baton Rouge and I thought I was hot stuff with my prep routine. This older guy named Curtis watched me for maybe 10 minutes and just said, flat out, "You're rolling the brush instead of laying it." I brushed it off at first, but he made me stop and showed me how my wrist was twisting the wire brush so I was smearing crud back into the groove instead of pulling it out. Turns out I was re-contaminating about a third of every joint I prepped, which explained why I kept getting small leaks on hydro that I could never trace. He had me change my grip so the brush strokes all ran one way, out of the joint, and it added maybe 15 seconds per joint. Two turnarounds later I have not had a single repeat leak on a rolled joint, and my rework time dropped enough that my foreman asked what I changed. Curtis retired last spring but I still hear his voice when my wrist starts to cheat. Has anyone else had an old hand call out something small like that which turned out to be a big deal?
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the_wren7d ago
Disagree that the brush stroke was the whole fix there. Curtis caught a real problem, but 15 seconds a joint adds up over a turnaround, and if your foreman only noticed after two more jobs, the leaks were probably a mix of prep and your roll technique. Small habits matter, but chasing one magic move can keep you from seeing the other thing that's actually biting you.
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