PSA: check your mud drum before hydro, learned that one the hard way in Gary

Got called to a job in Gary last Tuesday to hydro a 300 hp Cleaver-Brooks and found a hairline crack in the mud drum that a guy with 30 years on me would have caught just by looking at the scale pattern. My old foreman used to make us tap every tube sheet with a ball peen before the inspector showed up, said the sound told you more than any dye pen kit, and I used to roll my eyes at that. Anybody still doing the tap test or did that die out with the slide rule crowd?

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joseph_torres1mo ago

That scale pattern thing is no joke, I caught a cracked mud drum on a 200 hp in Hammond last year just by seeing how the rust lines ran. Still carry a ball peen in my bucket for exactly that reason, tapping tube sheets and around the handhole tells you plenty before the dye pen even comes out. The old timers were onto something, they just never wrote it down.

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