I always enjoy seeing how y'all do things in other parts of the country and in work that I've never been around. I got to spend some time around some scaffolding last night and it reminded me of the Bluedreaux that I was, before I was Bluedreaux. I thought some of y'all might enjoy seeing some stuff that's relatively specific to the industrial refining industry.

Way back then I wasn't allowed to have a camera at work and never thought to take pictures of stuff anyway. But I found some pics online and metal sticks all look the same anyway.

The most fun I've ever had at work was building scaffolding in refineries. We never used the frame stuff, it was all stick scaffolding put together one piece at a time.

The guys in the middle had a crap job....You just stood there and passed 40# boards and legs to the guys above you all day long. But if you weren't afraid of heights and had some hustle you would stay at the top putting it all together. The decks were put on as you built it up, so you never had a deck to stand on to build, you just stood on the horizontal bars or the lips on the legs.


They would get complicated sometimes, having to build around weird tanks or building hanging scaffolding kinda like in the second pic.




But I liked it best when we went straight up. The highest I ever went was 140'. And when you got that high you were nearly all by yourself, standing on a 2" pipe, handling 10' long 40# legs, just swaying in the wind.


There were usually too many guys going up when the day started and after breaks to use the ladders so we'd just grab a leg on a corner and start shimmying straight up to the top. It was a blast.

After I got on full time with a maintenance crew we also did asbestos abatement and insulation / metal work.

After building the scaffolding we'd wrap the entire thing in several layers of plastic sheeting, spray glueing and duct taping as we went. After it was all closed in we attached giant air movers with HEPA filters in them to the ground floor (blowing out) to keep negative pressure on the whole structure.

The refineries wouldn't shut the machines off until the very last minute, which was after the asbestos was removed. So we worked all day in respirators, rubber boots and doubled up Tyvek suits. When we stopped for a break we would pour the sweat out of our boots like we'd been standing in the rain.

The reinforced plastic we used melted at 325*. One of the plastic walls was about two feet from the end of a tank we were stripping and kept melting so fast that we had to station one guy at the wall to just keep replacing that piece of plastic every few minutes. It was literally like working in an oven and they'd sometimes have to rotate us out of the structure every twenty minutes or so.

After the asbestos was off we'd reinsulate the pipes and tanks (with stuff that's just as dangerous and they'll have to remove the same way in 20 years). But after the insulation was on we'd wrap it all in aluminum or stainless steel.

This job wasn't as fun as the scaffolding because you were usually crawling through pipes and working pretty cramped a lot of the time. But it soothed my OCD more than anything else I've ever done. I really, really miss doing the metal work. All of the metal was cut to length and the corners / valves / end caps were laid out in our shop. So if you could lay out the corners and heads you could skip most of the insulating to work on the metal back at the shop.

Some of it was just regular piping and you might run hundreds of feet of uninterrupted pipe. But some was a maze of corners and valves and joints. To get the metal in place on the large tanks we'd buy bungee cord on a spool and wrap the entire tank-or use metal bands with giant springs every 20' or so.





The heads would need the insulation cut into blocks around 3"-6" wide and filled in with wedges. Then they'd be mudded over with a quickcrete type mixture and given a contour that the metal would cover without buckling. When the tank was vertical and we had to do a bottom head each piece of insulation had to be kept in place with a bungee strap until we could secure the section with stainless tie wire.





When I left the job money was tight and I aaaaallllllmost sold my banders (that you used to tighten the SS straps around the metal) but I hung on to them. They're like these, only all the finish is worn off of them. I keep them around now to remind me that no matter how bad I think my job is, I could always be back in a refinery in a plastic oven.

Posts like this absolutely make these fora.

Helluva post. Better you than me. Pears sent.

Eric, I am glad there are folks that are willing to do that sort of work. God knows I would be a disaster 'up there', swaying in the wind.
Good pictorial, and thanks.

You're my boy Blue......You're my boy.



Thank God I'm not fond of heights.
Thanks for spilling the beans. Good write up.

Interestink, veddy interestink Blue. I was a plumbers apprentice and grew up on a farm, decided police work was more to my liking.

I'd still be doing it but one day I realized that carpenters never retire, they just become old carpenters. At some point I wanna stay home and enjoy time with my wife, so I do this instead.

I'm eleven years in and I suppose it's just a phase, but I'm really done with this gig. I hope I get over it before I do something stupid like quit, but there are other things to do that would be much more rewarding.

What do you do now, Blue?

Some here assume I'm a cop but I'd never admit to it, lol.

So you gave up the bear wrasslin' gig?

We trained [bleep] to fly in spacecraft in the early 60,s.


























































































































Good job building scaffolding with your erector set Jimmy Neutron.

I ain't dead yet, there's still time!

Gotcha! Good luck with the bear wrasslin' gig. If you need any help keepin' the ladies in line....

Blue, my estimation of you has risen to new heights. I owned and operated a company in SOCAL for10 years doing the same thing.
interesting but not what wanted to d when grew up. still don't
know what that is {except for fishing, hunting, being big game hunter in Africa, treasure hunter etc.) alas though all I do is hunt and fish.

those are great pictures that demonstrate the things that made this country great and the things that are eating away at that greatness. like the removal of static asbestos just to satisfy some EPA's stupid edict. been there done that. Escaped

We make a lot of springs that are used in refinery piping of one sort or another, also the insulation jacketing systems.

Wish O would approve Keystone, it would probably increase refining activity, which would be a good thing for us.

you can forget Keystone. the only things zero approves is if it is bad for the country.

Zero has a different pipeline coming up through mexico...