The Locomotive - Lighthouse Survival Blog

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PUBLISHED BY THE HARTFORD STEAM BOILER INSPECTION AND INSURANCE COMPANY.
Vol. XXII. HARTFORD, CONN., MARCH, 1901. No. 3.
A Few Small Things About Boilers.
A good many of the things that are wrong about boilers, are so because somebody
didn't know any better. There are plenty of small troubles that are not of this kind,
however, but are rather due to the fact that somebody didn't think hard enough about
what he was doing. The boiler-maker is responsible for many slips of this sort, and it
sometimes happens that a boiler that he turns out is just wrong enough to make the
prospective buyer doubtful whether he ought to accept it or not. An illustration or
two will make this clear.
The two heads of a horizontal tubular boiler having been made ready for riveting
into position, it is not by any means uncommon for the builder to put them in so that
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they are not exactly "fair " with each other, one of them being twisted around (say)
one rivet hole too far, so that the holes for the tubes do not exactly match the cones-
ponding ones on the other head. This mistake is a very easy one to make; and if it
is discovered before the work has gone too far, it is easily remedied by taking out one of
the heads and replacing it correctly. It often happens, however, that the error is not
noticed until the boiler is nearly completed and the tubes are practically all in position,
so that it would be an expensive operation to make things right. The boiler is there-
fore delivered, in the hope that the mistake will be either overlooked or condoned.
This particular kind of defect is not especially serious, when the heads fail to match
each other by only a single rivet hole, although a boiler the tubes of which lie along a