Heard a dive supervisor in Houston say 'never trust O-rings past 3 months' and it stuck with me

I was at a joint inspection meeting near the ship channel last month and this old school supervisor was going off about how many leaks he's seen from guys using O-rings that sat in a hot toolbox for half a year. He said he replaces every seal on his rig every 90 days no matter what, even if it looks fine. Has anyone else dealt with a failure from something that looked okay but just aged out?

3 comments

3 Comments

brian_smith61mo ago

Man that old timer's got a point but 90 days seems a bit aggressive unless you're running some nasty chems or high heat. I had a buddy who worked on a frac site and he swore by 60 day swaps on everything cause the pressure spikes would eat seals alive. But here's what cracked me up his helper was bragging about how he'd just flip O-rings over and reuse them like that would somehow fix the flat spot. Dude thought he was saving the company money until they had a blowout on a 5000 psi line and it looked like a firehose went wild in the doghouse. They ended up having to replace half the panel and the helper got moved to janitorial duty for a month. It's wild how guys think rubber is magic or something. Heat and time cook them no matter how good they look sitting in the drawer.

kevin_west1mo ago

Yikes, did the helper ever find out what the bill ran for that panel swap?

jennifer_jenkins1mo ago

...we had a similar thing happen at our shop a few years back. What finally worked for us was switching to a standardized schedule based on the fluid type and pressure rating we were running. We did 60 day swaps on anything over 3000 psi and 90 day on everything else, but we also started logging each panel's service hours on a whiteboard in the break room. That way the guys couldn't argue about when something was due, and it stopped the "it looks fine" arguments dead in their tracks...