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Spent 14 hours chasing a leak on a 60 inch shell seam and it was the $8 gauge the whole time
Everyone says soap bubble test first, but I did that three times on the vertical seam at the Muddy Creek plant and got nothing, so I tore half the insulation off like an idiot. Turns out my pressure gauge was reading 40 psi low, so the shell never actually got up to test pressure and the bubbles had nothing to show. Bought a $200 calibrated gauge, retested in 20 minutes, found a pinhole the size of a pen tip. Now I check my instruments before I ever touch a torch. Anyone else got a cheap tool that cost them a whole shift?
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william_carter21d ago
Thats a brutal lesson but I gotta push back a bit, because blaming the gauge feels like the easy answer when the real problem is skipping a check on gear that takes two minutes. A cheap gauge will lie to you every time, sure, but a $200 one can drift too if nobody has it on a cal schedule. Where do you all draw the line on which tools get checked before every job versus once a year?
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