When I first started my professional career, I was a field engineer in the oilfield, working on drilling rigs around Texas. There was some amount of computer stuff, but a lot of hardware work too. One of the things that we had to do was install a pressure sensor on the drilling mud line, which is normally pressurized to around 2k psi with water or oil-based drilling fluid.
This sounds like a simple task, but it gets complicated by the variety of pipe fittings and adapters available. Our sensors are a particular thread type, and we have to find a free slot to install them, and come up with any pipe connection converters necessary to install them there. Another tricky part is that the rig workers who actually know about all of this stuff are often not particularly eager to help out.
So on one particular job, the only free slot to install the sensor is a male pipe fitting, capped with some sort of female plug. Our sensors are male in that pipe size, so I need a female-female adapter to install it. I go looking around and come up with one, not paying too much attention to it. I install it, and everything seems to go more or less smoothly. We go on drilling with this installed for like a week or two.
One day, the rig manager comes to find me and ask me about this adapter that I used. He tells me that it is meant for drinking water lines, and is only rated to 200 psi. And had been installed on a 2000 psi line for weeks. My jaw dropped in shock - I have no idea how that adapter didn't fail, and it's entirely possible it could have hurt or killed somebody if it did.
They sent one of their guys to find an adapter that was actually rated for the pressure and replace it, and never said much else of it. No telling how much trouble I could have been in there if anything else had happened. It did make me a lot more safety-conscious.
This sounds like a simple task, but it gets complicated by the variety of pipe fittings and adapters available. Our sensors are a particular thread type, and we have to find a free slot to install them, and come up with any pipe connection converters necessary to install them there. Another tricky part is that the rig workers who actually know about all of this stuff are often not particularly eager to help out.
So on one particular job, the only free slot to install the sensor is a male pipe fitting, capped with some sort of female plug. Our sensors are male in that pipe size, so I need a female-female adapter to install it. I go looking around and come up with one, not paying too much attention to it. I install it, and everything seems to go more or less smoothly. We go on drilling with this installed for like a week or two.
One day, the rig manager comes to find me and ask me about this adapter that I used. He tells me that it is meant for drinking water lines, and is only rated to 200 psi. And had been installed on a 2000 psi line for weeks. My jaw dropped in shock - I have no idea how that adapter didn't fail, and it's entirely possible it could have hurt or killed somebody if it did.
They sent one of their guys to find an adapter that was actually rated for the pressure and replace it, and never said much else of it. No telling how much trouble I could have been in there if anything else had happened. It did make me a lot more safety-conscious.