Wrote off tube rolling on water walls for years, then a 2 inch sag on a hogged fuel boiler in Gary set me straight

Elliot King · 2026-10-31T15:55:04.1254+00:00

I used to think tube rolling was tube rolling, just crank the torque and move on, and I ran a crew that way for 6 years. Last month we were buttoning up a hogged fuel unit outside Gary and a water wall tube sprung a leak at the joint 3 days after startup, so I had the guy cut it out and you could see the tube had only expanded about 60 percent of the wall thickness. Turns out the old timer on the job, Ray, kept telling me to measure the expansion with a gauge on every single roll and I kept waving him off because it slowed us down. Now we check every roll and log it, and I feel dumb for the 6 years of flying blind. Any of you run a rolling log on water walls or is that overkill on your jobs?

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Wrote off tube rolling on water walls for years, then a 2 inch sag on a hogged fuel boiler in Gary set me straight | Boilermakers - The Community Guide