We've lost some interesting information lately when not so interesting information about boilermakers got into the good information about boilers and how to build and repair them. Can we keep the baby and remove the bathwater?

I'm working on the replacement of a rear tube sheet and riveted seam right now. It's pretty well condemnable from the seam at the crown sheet and along the side sheets down into the throat, but the crown sheet and side sheets behind the riveted seam are good. The bottom of the throat might be, we have to take a closer look when we get there - I'm pretty sure it is a good idea to not try to save the bottom few inches and just deal with the whole thing now, so I'll be dead before we have to do it again. Oddly comforting.....

This isn't about my particulars, just illustrating the kind of thing we all find it necessary to deal with from time to time, and how it can run from ways to replace broken stays and deal with loose braces to replacing old riveted boilers with new welded replacements. We've seen graphic illustrations of crown sheets with very misaligned rows of staybolts, side sheets with misaligned welded seams - and i have no interest in who did what, just in the what and how to do it well, no matter who is involved. Really good craftsmen have bad days and really smart people can try dumb things - bad craftsmen and dumb people just don't learn from it is the difference.

So, opinions have been offered about issues which have arisen with new boilers built recently - I know something about the Dixiana situation from long talks with Dan Ranger sharing ideas when we both had Shay firebox things to deal with at the same time. I'd be very interested in the Texan boilers and leaving names out of it, what problems they might have or why they don't have any, and specifics of their construction and design. I'm interested in the different designs for boiler construction between German and US practice - US seems to deal with stresses by resisting them, in rigid bodies, the Germans try to accommodate them within less rigid bodies based on my incomplete understanding - neither philosophy is perfect, I think the differences are worth consideration. Means by which staybolts can be installed is a subject of a lot of interest, I think.......as are the specifics of best use of rigid VS flexible, Tross VS straight, etc.

Forming plates without using huge dies and presses for a one-off is another topic of a lot of interest - we touched on that a while back. JDC offered a great way to accurately stay new plates, it would be good to know about other ways. Can we even get good boiler plate in the 60K Ts range anymore?

There's a lot of good knowledge to be shared and gained of we leave the personalities out of it and talk about the hardware. Can we do so?

dave

dave,

I certainly hope so. It would be most unfortunate to lose good information over personalities.

Howard P.

Ditto

I'm for that, too.

Regardless of how competant or brilliant somebody may be, their eager participation in an online pissing contest is reason enough for me to take my business elsewhere.

The rulebook of any "real railroad" specificly prohibits fighting on duty or on the property.

Everybody WORK SAFE

The censored boiler thread had something about staybolts corroding down to a fraction of original diameter. That was both interesting and alarming. What were those figures again? I repaired marine boilers in my soot-covered mid 20s, so have an interest in this stuff.

Reminds me, when I worked on boilers, the company engrs had installed sonic soot blowers in the fire sides and that had some interesting unintended side effects: cracks in all the furnace welds. Be careful of what you think might be a good idea!

All staybolts except new ones are corroded to a fraction of original diameter. At some point the fraction is small enough to make a difference...if they don't fracture before then. I like welded-in bolts because they don't have the long spiral reduction from OD to RD as a starting point for loss, and because they don't loosen around the threads and require caulking. Strasburg did tests of fillet welded stays some years ago which were of interest, but I don't know that we can use that technique legally at this point. Assuming you can reach the narrowest part with a caliper and measure it, you have the basis for calculating its failure point and thus its maximum allowable stress at your factor of safety. Or, you can figure out what the minimum diameter is at your operating pressure, and make a go/nogo gauge to use in testing them.

dave

Friends,

The boiler stuff is indeed interesting. I'm a boiler guy, working on and around all sorts of boilers since I was 14 years old. I like the boiler information. The problem is when an attack on a person or company is woven into the information.

Mistakes can happen in any business. Learning how they are corrected and avoided is good. Attacking the company or person is not. We have no way of knowing what is true and what is not and we're not the truth police.

Sharing a nice anecdote about a kind businessman who repaired and built boilers is great. Painting his children as villains is unacceptable. Their business decisions may or may not have been influenced by a lot of factors including greed, as was inferred, but also factors completely unknown to any of us. Again, we're not the truth police and there is no good reason to drag people through the mud.

The message from your friendly moderators is when venturing into those topics please keep the personal stuff out. If you have an axe to grind do it somewhere else. it is sad when a lot of good information must be discarded because it is woven with attacks but that is what happens.

Your friendly moderator,

Tom Gears