A boiler blew a gasket at the paper mill in Port Townsend and I changed my whole prep routine

I was working a shutdown at the paper mill out in Port Townsend last spring. We were doing a routine hydro test on this old Babcock and Wilcox boiler when the handhole gasket let go at around 150 psi. Water shot across the room and soaked my tools. The foreman just shook his head and said that gasket was 6 months past its shelf life. I never paid much attention to gasket dates before that. Now I check every single gasket I pull out of the box and write the install date on the outer edge with a sharpie. That one blowout cost us 4 hours of downtime waiting for a replacement. Has anyone else had a gasket fail on them because the rubber was too old?

3 comments

3 Comments

ward.anna7d agoMost Upvoted

Failed gaskets are just another example of how people overlook simple things until they cost them real money or time. Same thing happens with tires on a truck or belts on a machine, we push them way past their rated life because we get used to them working. A little bit of planning up front saves a whole lot of headache later.

rileyprice5d ago

Whoa, hold on, you're telling me you had gaskets sitting in a hot warehouse for three years and they still worked? That's wild. I don't think I've ever seen a warehouse that didn't turn into an oven in the summer months. I'm genuinely surprised the material didn't get brittle or start to crack from the heat alone. Maybe the engineers behind those date codes are being extra cautious, but I still think I'd be nervous putting a three-year-old gasket on anything important.

taylor9577d ago

But is it really the gasket's age that's the problem here? I've seen guys swap out a brand new gasket that failed an hour later because they torqued it down wrong or the flange surface was scratched up. Seems like you're blaming the calendar when maybe you should be looking at your install method. Plus, six months past shelf life sounds like a rule written by a lawyer not an engineer. I've pulled gaskets out of boxes that sat in a hot warehouse for three years and they sealed fine because the material was stored right. Temperature and humidity matter way more than a printed date code. Maybe the real issue is that you're not storing your gaskets in a climate controlled space.