I was reading an old trade journal and the pressure specs for early riveted boilers blew my mind

I was cleaning out my garage over the weekend and found a stack of my granddad's old 'Power Engineering' magazines from the 1950s. I flipped through one and saw an article about a boiler shop in Pittsburgh that was still building riveted units for some mills. The working pressure they listed for a big, riveted steam drum was only about 150 psi. I had to read it twice. We work with welded drums now that handle over 1,000 psi easy on a standard utility job. It just hit me how much the materials and codes have changed in a couple of generations. The article talked about the crew spending weeks just on the riveting for a single drum. Now we'd have that section welded, x-rayed, and heat-treated in a few days. It makes you respect the old hands who built those things, but also makes you glad for modern procedures. Do you think the skill shift from riveting to high-end welding is the biggest change in our trade's history?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_viola7d ago

You said "only about 150 psi," but honestly, that's still a lot of pressure for just rivets holding it together.

lilyt906d ago

Totally get that... but you gotta remember how many rivets they use. Spreads the load out over a huge area.