Vent: that Tuesday in Gary when every single tube sheet fought us
Last Tuesday we were doing a retube on a small package boiler at a food plant in Gary, Indiana, and it was the worst shift I have had in a long time. Started at 6am and by 9 we had already wrecked two tube rollers because the wall thickness on the new tubes was off from what the spec sheet said. Then my partner Kenny slipped on some condensate and tweaked his back, so he was out and we were down a man for the whole day. The supe kept pushing us to finish the bottom row before lunch but we couldn't get the expander to seat right no matter what we tried. Around 2pm I found out the tubes they sent were from a different mill than the last batch, which is why nothing was matching up. Ended up putting in 13 hours and only got about 40 tubes done, which is less than half of what we should've knocked out. Any of you run into a tube order that was spec'd right on paper but acted totally different in the field?