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I was introduced to piping in my second job interview after
graduating from Cal with a BSME in 1980. CF Braun and Company
flew me down to Burbank and had a limousine drive me to the Braun
campus in Alhambra, California. Braun was an EPC (Engineering,
Procurement and Construction) firm specializing in process plants
(oil refineries, chemical plants, nuclear power plants, etc.)
competing with Fluor and Bechtel. After the interview, I
accepted a generous offer to become a piping specification
writer. This, of course, was non-fiction writing but I soon
found out that the Braun piping department was full of characters,
like the Zuhr brothers who hung their coats in my office closet so
they could leave work early on occasion without detection, Bill
"Squeaky" Fromm who was an amateur glamour photographer, and Five-O
who thought it was funny to activate a fart machine whenever
the client visited me. The piping department does a lot of
serious work though: lead designers lay out the equipment and
pipe-ways (plot plans), optimize pipe routing between equipment and
process units (plans, elevations and details) and generate detail
drawings (isometrics) with Bills of Material for shop fabrication;
engineers specify materials, fabrication, construction and
inspection requirements and perform stress analysis to insure that
the piping has sufficient wall and flexibility to handle the hoop
stress associated with temperature and pressure of the contained
fluid as well the long stresses associated with span, thermal growth
and seismic events. Piping materials come in many alloys
(carbon, chrome-moly, stainless, nickel and galvanized steels and
non-metallics like fiberglass, PVC and HDPE) and many component
shapes (straight pipe lengths, elbows and bends, tees and olets,
reducers and swages, couplings and unions. etc.). I found the
complexities of piping and pipers to make for a fulfilling
occupation. |
