I thought tube rolling was a waste of time until a job in Gary taught me otherwise

Jessica Green · 2026-09-29T05:30:03.949422+00:00

Two months back I got sent to a shop in Gary to retube a small firetube boiler and the foreman told me to roll every tube by hand instead of torquing them down fast like I always did. I figured it was a bunch of extra work for nothing, since I'd been running the same routine on similar jobs for six years and never had a leaker come back on me. But he pushed me to try it his way on just the first 40 tubes, so I did, and when we hydro tested that section we had zero weeps while the other 60 tubes I rushed had three. Turns out rolling slow lets the metal flow into the seat right instead of just squishing it, and the difference showed up plain as day on the gauge when we hit 150 psi. So yeah, I'm eating my words on this one. Has anyone else had a job where the slow way actually beat the fast way by that much, or did I just get lucky with that batch of tubes?

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I thought tube rolling was a waste of time until a job in Gary taught me otherwise | Boilermakers - Librear