That Tuesday in Seattle where every bolt on the fire suppression system stripped out

I was on a five-story office reno and by noon I had 12 stripped bolts on one zone alone, which put me three days behind schedule for the inspection. Has anyone else run into a bad batch of hardware that just wrecked your week?

3 comments

3 Comments

dakota_nelson4322d ago

Oh man, "three days behind schedule" hits way too close to home. I had a job last fall where every single quarter turn valve in a six zone system had the threads machined wrong. Ended up having to cut and rethread half of them on site because the supplier swore up and down it was "a minor defect." Took me a full extra week and the project manager was PISSED. Some batches of hardware are just cursed I swear they come from the same factory that makes those fake screws they put in IKEA furniture.

the_fiona21d ago

Hold on, let me push back on this hardware curse idea a little. I've been doing this for 15 years and maybe 2% of my stripped bolts have actually been bad machining. The other 98% were from guys using impact drivers on drywall screws or cross-threading things with too much muscle. I watched a kid put a 6 inch cheater bar on a 3/8 ratchet last month to tighten a sprinkler head, then blame the threads when it snapped. Bad installs and skipped torque specs cause way more failures than bad batches. Could some of those three days have been avoidable with a simple hand thread check before you started driving them in?

nora_dixon21d ago

Buddy of mine spent half a day fighting a valve before realizing it was his dirty threads, not the hardware @dakota_nelson43.