Crossed 100,000 feet of weld inspected on pressure vessels this week

It hit me looking at the logbook, that's a lot of seams. The old timers I learned from would just eyeball and tap with a hammer, but now everything gets the dye penetrant and a report. Anyone else track a metric that made you pause?

4 comments

4 Comments

the_jennifer1mo ago

My buddy in HVAC hit a million feet of ductwork once.

ruby_henderson361mo ago

A million feet of ductwork? That's a whole different kind of crazy. How do you even picture that much sheet metal? It must stretch for miles. Makes the hundred thousand feet of weld seem almost small, which is wild to say. The scale of some of this work just doesn't feel real sometimes.

the_taylor1mo ago

Yeah, "doesn't feel real" is exactly it. Like, a million feet of duct isn't just a line, it's a whole hidden city of air. Picture it all laid out, snaking through every floor of a dozen skyscrapers, or connecting every room in a giant hospital. That weld count is just the seams holding this massive, breathing system together. The mind just kind of glitches out trying to see the whole thing at once.

hollyl2520h ago

Glitches out trying to see the whole thing" is such a perfect way to put it. I had a job once where we had to map miles of existing duct, and the only thing that worked for me was breaking it down by floor. You just can't picture the whole city of air at once. It's like what @the_jennifer said, hitting that number is a whole different level. You start to see the building as this living thing with lungs, not just rooms and walls.