I have the tanks.
The person who welded the Gen1 prototypes is no longer at the company. This guy appears to be even better.
I am really impressed with his conscientiousness and attention to detail. He did a nice job, really nice! And, all this in spite of pressures from the owner. It turns out, the guy in estimating and sales is not a great communicator (understatement). As a result, all sorts of problems rolled down and were dumped on the welder.
Here are a few photos:
In the above photo, you can see the finish on the bottom of the tank does not match. I explained to our friend that the bottom surface needs to be flat as it rests on the grab rail bushings and front risers, and that all those surfaces need to be in the same plane. He took that and ran with it! Before welding those front risers on, he made sure that surface was
flat!
Also, I explained that just tacking the baffles in place did not seem to be enough. We didn't need a lot of weld, but we needed a bit more. In my opinion, he took my vague request and nailed it. Look and the amount of weld on the baffles:
So, these are nice. Now, back to the pricing pressures... The boss lady is giving the crew some heat about the costs, so there was some resistance to pressure testing these. I didn't argue too much for two reasons: 1. The guy doing the welding is not going to fail us 2. I don't have a lot of room to complain about price. These did cost a lot to produce, but that should be on the estimator/sales guy, ... whatever. I have plans to talk to the owner later about lessons learned.
Right now, I plan to leak test these myself. The last thing we need is someone pressure testing these and destroying them in the process. I'll plug the drain bung, fill 'em up and place them on dry cardboard. Any leaks will be immediately visible.
After that, I will dry them thoroughly and finish assembling them.
Sorry for the added delay.
