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Met an old dredge hand on the Mississippi who showed me a trick I still use
I was working a small job near Baton Rouge last spring, dredging a cutoff channel that kept silting up. This older guy, must have been pushing 70, came by the barge just to watch. I was running a 12-inch cutterhead and getting frustrated with how slow we were moving. He finally spoke up and said I had my ladder angle all wrong... told me to drop the heel down by almost 2 feet and slow the swing to half speed. I figured he was just some retiree messing with me, but I tried it anyway. The difference was night and day - we went from digging 40 yards an hour to almost 70. He just laughed and said I was fighting the weight of the pipeline. Has anyone else had an old timer give advice that actually worked better than what you learned in training?
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the_derek1mo ago
Honestly, I gotta push back on the whole "old timer knows best" thing. Just because some guy on a barge told you to drop the heel and slow down doesn't mean his advice was better than what you learned in training. You said he was 'pushing 70' and just watching, which sounds more like a guy with time to kill than an expert. Training teaches you the standard methods for a reason, like consistency and safety. That 40 yards an hour you were getting might have been slow, but it was predictable and probably what the specs called for. Cranking it up to 70 with some random tweak could put extra stress on the gear or the pipeline, and you're lucky it worked out. Sometimes slow and steady beats a quick fix from a stranger.
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jade321mo ago
That 40 yards an hour was the safe spec for a reason. You don't just ditch standard procedures because some retired pipefitter who isn't even on the clock says so. The gear and the line are rated for certain speeds and settings, not some guy's gut feeling from 1978. If that 70 yard pace had snapped a weld or stressed the pipe, nobody's old timer story would have saved your job. Slow and boring keeps everyone out of the incident report.
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