Showerthought: Everyone swears by that new ceramic fiber blanket for furnace linings, but I had a massive failure with it on a job in Toledo last month.

The blanket's advertised 2300F rating didn't hold up under a rapid heat cycle, causing a section of the furnace wall to slump and forcing a 48-hour shutdown to tear out and re-brick the whole area with traditional castable.

3 comments

3 Comments

rileym9425d ago

Ugh, tell me about it. We tried that same stuff on a forge door and it just fell apart after a week of normal use. The spec sheet says one thing, but real world heat cycling is a whole different beast. It's like they only test it in a perfect lab, not in an actual dirty, vibrating shop. Cost us more in downtime to fix it than we saved buying the fancy blanket.

riley4325d ago

Did they even ask what kind of thermal cycling you'd be doing? Every time I read a spec sheet now I wonder if they just bake it once and call it good... real shops have doors slamming and temperature swings all day long. Makes you wonder what their testing actually looks like.

coleman.gray24d ago

Sounds about right for most spec sheets these days.