/morning coffee ramble
I was at one of the larger food processing plants in the US a few weeks back. Had to swap out some equipment controls and needed to work 4x12s with three people to get it done quickly enough. It wasn't really in my 'wheelhouse' per se (I used to work on a motor driven versions of that equipment by a different manufacturer, and this stuff is more high-end pneumatic stuff) but spring outage season was well underway and my company was scrambling for people to send.
The electricians had already run new rigid to each location (about 30 drops) and then transitioned to seal tight whips. The conduit was for a single 2-conductor cable for HART communication. The rigid was already done when we got there, including the sealing/potting.
I was purposely trying to not spend any of my time looking over the Electricians work. Especially because the area was a hazardous location. Vanilla-style Seal Tight in places like that always bothers me but I think there's an exception if the voltage is under 30V or something? That or I'm mis-remembering and there's no problem with it. But they had done their sealing so I just told myself mentally to 'stay in my lane' LOL. But it's common in lots of places so /shrug
If you've done Seal Tight terminations, you'll know the ferrule (I always called it a 'cup'), and it needs to be installed tight over the end of the Seal Tight. I wasn't looking but the guy we went up there to help was, and he noticed that on about half or more of them, they never pushed it on all the way (I'd twist them on with channel locks then use the face of my linesmen pliers to tap it down to make sure it was seated) so when they tightened the connectors, it would push the sealtight itself "out" of the fitting so that the cut-end wasn't just visible, it wasn't even inside of the connector anymore.
It was like something you might need to correct a 1st-year on. It was so bizarre to see in a place like that. And THEN I started glancing around here and there and just shaking my head. It was one of those deals where 90% of their work was tip-top, but there'd be little things that were wrong or janky.
We needed a hot work permit to take laptops in later to set/adjust/install settings. But weirdly enough they still wouldn't allow phones inside. They were probably thinking that people could take pictures of trade-secrets or somesuch, but motherfucker I could have filmed shit with the laptop I had? SMFH
It was the first time bending instrumentation tubing for me, though, so that was new. Wasn't very hard compared to conduit, but I also wasn't trying to do anything complicated or fancy either. They had a single pipefitter there doing it, but he was mostly by himself and that poor bastard was swamped.
