One more turn
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked at a Coke plant. One of the jobs you got early in your machinist’s apprenticeship was to tighten hogrods; hogrods are the big threaded bars that hold the coke batteries together. They’re twenty feet long and three inches in diameter. There are two on each oven, and 120 ovens on the battery.
The rods stretch. They are holding together millions of tons of refractory brick that is surrounding coal dust being heated to 2100 degrees. The temp of the rods is usually several hundred degrees.
SO every week some poor bastard has to take a 120 lb impact wrench, with a socket the size of your head, and lift it up on a scissor lift, and tie the impact off to the battery, and sit for a half hour EACH NUT and tighten the hogrods.
After you’ve done this two hundred times, in August heat, in a coke battery tied to an oven whose surface temperature melts lead, you want to make it stop, please sweet Jesus just make it STOP.
So on my third trip around this merry go round of the damned, I was all for doing anything that would make it last longer between jobs, so I tried to tighten just a little bit more. In normal operation, you would connect the impact wrench, and turn it on, and stand there while it went “THAK THAK THAK THAK” at about 90 db for a half hour, usually causing the nut to rotate one revolution (approximately) before it stalled.
I knew that I could use steam on this impact, and that the steam would make it a bit more powerful than air, so I cranked away, getting a full turn on each nut in less than fifteen minutes, and on every one I could, I tried to get another at least half turn.
The impact was heating up even more than usual because of the steam, but you wore heavy hot mill gloves for everything there, so who cared? Anyway, I had gone through about fifteen rods and was on number sixteen when I thought, Damn, I’m gonna get one more full turn on this bastard and I won’t have to hit it again for another two weeks!!
About three quarters of the way through the second turn the bolt snapped. The force of a 3″ bolt snapping caused the 20′ rod to be propelled out over lake Michigan, where it spashed down next to a marker buoy, and the broken nut and stub caused the whole scissor lift to sway back and stand, for a few anxious seconds, on the balance point of it’s outside two wheels.
I felt a little funny in the pants, for a moment, as my testes attempted unsuccessfully to reinsert themselves in my inguinal canal, and my buttcheeks grabbed the handrail of the scissorlift, and then it settled back down, bringing the impact and my helmeted head into clanging contact with the side of the battery.
Thus was born the One More Turn award. The broken off nut and rod stub was sandblasted, gilt, and mounted to a board. I was honored with the first occurrence, but it got many other engraved nameplates after I left.
Two years ago, I replaced the front axle bearings on the Exploder and the lower and upper balljoints. Monday, I replaced the bearings AGAIN, and discovered one of the balljoints was bad AGAIN. So tonight I swapped it out, and in the process fo reassembling it, managed to SNAP THE 12MM BOLT THAT HOLDS THE UPPER IN.
Don’t know my own strength, even now.
18 comments Og | Shadetree Mechanic, Uncategorized
One more turn, one more pull on the wrench, on more click on the ratchet….Man, I’ve been there.
Not with 3-inch diameter all-thread and sockets as big as my head, but with little metric bolts blindly threaded into an aluminum cylinder head. I was trying to get one more quarter-turn on a bolt that holds the injector bracket so that it wouldn’t come loose before the next oil change when the threads pulled.
Good story!
Heh heh. Now that’s some quality humor right there!
lol. Good one.
They got this thing now… called a ‘torque wrench’.
Learn to love it.
This spoken by a man who did EVERYTHING he could in 1/4 drive in an effort to stop breaking every fastener he looked at.
I was USING a torque wrench. A Snap-On that I had just had recalibrated. And it never clicked.
And I thought having to stomp on the wrench to loosen my bicycle wheels was impressive. How the heck do you still have all your fingers?
Any of us who have worked around powerful machinery in the past are all lucky if we have all of our fingers.
Either that or very skilled.
Nah, just lucky. :)
I have to say that my favorite tool at Stewart-Warner was the plasma torch. Damme if that wasn’t fun to play with. And it cut 6061 and 5083 aluminum like a hot knife through butter.
“Any of us who have worked around powerful machinery in the past are all lucky if we have all of our fingers.”
Amen to that. I’ve lost the fingernails on each of my fingers at least once or twice from having them smashed. Just one of the hazards of some jobs.
Yeap, you were getting it ‘Farmer’ tight. I do it ALL the time. Why? Because anything less always loosens when you’re in the middle of nowhere and you have to walk home.
All The Best,
Frank W. James
Ok, I gotta ask: what’s involved in getting a new 20′ x 3″ rod threaded back into an active coke battery?
Two cranes, six people,and a lot of luck and miserable hard work.
Anyone who says the tired old canard that “Illegals do work that Americans are unwilling to do”:
a) never met a Steelworker
b)need a smack upside the head, and a read through your mill posts. Every time I thought I’ve heard or read the ultimate mill tale, someone comes along with something like boinging a tensioned rod deep into the lake. You didn’t mention it, but the bang from that had to have loosened your dental fillings. I mean, damn.
I don’t know about fillings, but I pooped funny for a while afterwards.
Ya gotta remember, the proper torque on any fastener is “until just BEFORE it breaks”!
A former manager – in a rock quarry! – was fond of telling us how tight the bolts and nuts had to be on the shovel and the crushers:
“As tight as you can get it and one more turn!”
We used big wrenches and long cheater pipes!
Another at a cement pipe factory used to (and may still) say that nothing ever fell apart from being too tight. He used to break wrenches and twist off bolts, too.
Jon B.
yeah, I always say ‘Break it off and back off a quarter turn” but I try not to follow my own advice there.
“…but I pooped funny for a while afterwards…”
At least you could poop! I think my sphincter would have kept me locked up for a week.
In my younger years I worked in a foundry. Most people started off swinging a 16lb. sledge hammer and breaking castings from the risers. After about six months of that, in other words about the time you could start feeling your fingers again, you would get promoted out to a part of the plant where you did something other than break stuff.
We had one poor oglet type who continued breaking stuff the bosses didn’t want broken. He found permanent employment in his own personal niche – breaking steel.