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From August 2012, edited March 2013, added 10 October 2016


[Bruce Bullough] I'd like to get your comments, clarifications, experiences, etc., on carbon steel storage tanks at low temps. We have a carbon steel tank that we use as a reservoir tank in our chiller system - the general assumption is that it is a low grade CS, by the way, it's old and we don't have the shop drawing anymore. The chilled liquid (50:50 blend of water and methanol) is kept at -25°F (it might get as cold as -28°F). The tank is well guarded by bollards and the walls of a containment dike, and in a low-traffic area. I'm well aware that CS is not a cryogenic material, and it loses most of it's "toughness" by time it gets to ~0°F. Ideally a tank in this service should be austenitic stainless steel, a "cryo" grade material. I have a crude and general understanding of what toughness is, and that it is not brittleness.


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Again, it was the same long hot summer down south, same job as the last story. Here I wasn't on the side of the cheap man for a change.


As the project wound down, we came to the time for the punch list. I had invested a lot of time and sweat into this project and desperately wanted to see it run, but the cheap man (project manager) spoke: "There is no room in the budget to stay. Come home!"


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There are many stories that this phrase brings to mind, and this one comes from Bill Gusnard of Birmingham, Alabama:


In 1987, Bill was doing the mechanical engineering design for a small architectural firm in St. Louis. They had a client with retail stores (similar to Wal-Mart) and had previously designed six mid-level stand-alone stores for this client. When the request for bid was issued for another store, they bid on it, but it was awarded to another firm. Their contract with the storeowners allowed them to see copies of the competitor's drawings. When Bill looked over their drawings, he was amazed at what he saw. The winning bidder had copied all of his details on Stan-Pat and placed them on their drawings. Even more amazing, they had also copied all of the design down to the air handlers, chillers and other HVAC equipment as specified by Bill.


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Actually, this isn't exactly one of these stories, but I started it the same way. I can understand the direct result of an owner (or project manager) having to pay more because they cut the wrong part of the budget. And I can personally relate to "the cheap man" paying twice because in real life that is me. I am basically frugal (cheap) and have spent most of my life buying the "as good as" items from calculators to pencils to programs to appliances, etc. And usually I do pay twice in the end; either the product or service didn't do exactly what was needed or it didn't last. And sometimes it was just plain hard to use as in the case of calculators or programs.


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I'm not sure this belongs in this category, but I sure did learn a lesson. I was the cheap man not giving credence to what a pipe fitter told me. I wasn't paying him the respect he deserved.

 

 

 

I had field sketched an iso for modifications at a small stripping tower to add an exchanger in the feed line. As it sometimes happens, the nozzles weren't on the natural axis, but rotated which made the drawing difficult. When it was done, I was proud of it; a real work of art. I transmitted it to construction with a confidence that wasn't warranted.

 

 

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It was a coal preparation plant being built in the dead of winter in Central Illinois. None of us had ever even seen a coal operation, but we were now experts. After all, it was the early eighties and there wasn't much work around, especially for pipers. The contractor was recently cut from a nuke as construction was stopped and they were hungry too. The owner of the mine was cheap, but not the one who had to pay twice. It was us who paid several times over. But we were working and that made up for it.


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