Acetylene regulator / propane

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

I'v set up two gas sets to use oxy LPG, and used the Acetylene regulator on both. The first conversion was done so we could do a reasonably big cutting job, and the acetylene bottle was empty, It did a very good job, and the cut edge didn't seem as hard as usual.

Ian S C

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Clive Foster on 17/11/2017 18:38:34:

…

I know for an absolute fact that the high pressure regulators on the white-spot nitrogen bottles I used at RARDE / DERA / DRA / QinetiQ were not changed in 20 years.

…

Clive.

Read all about it in the Haddon-Cave Report which is about the causes of the 2006 Nimrod crash in Afghanistan.

Lots of detail, but Chapter 13 is interesting on organisational causes.

In the end political decisions about money were the root cause. Nothing has changed. Recent UK Governments have persistently reduced budgets without taking unpopular decisions to reduce the services they pay for. They also pass new legislation without funding it. In consequence the entire public sector is running on a shoe-string with failures across the board to deliver best practice whether it be Trading Standards, Fire Prevention Regulations, Prisons, Speed Cameras, Health, Defence or Policing. It would be excellent to blame MPs for these errors but it's you and me who vote for them. Sadly most people care more about right or left-wing positions than the competence, honesty and judgement of their representative even if they know who he or she is.

Dave

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

Have you read all 585 pages? That is some epic to press home the point of using the proper kit for the job and regular service maintenence/testing/replacement. I've got to about page 30 and find it absorbing – a real total depth analysis of the incident.

I occasionally chat with a proper aeronautical assessor for these sort of things; his attitude to failure is a stark comparison to that of many people I have worked with. Failsafe means just precisely that, when things fail at altitude.

[Nick HulmeParticipant @nickhulme30114]

I have a stash of nice NIB BOC regulators from the 80s,

The Oxygen regs do a nice job with Argon and with CO2, the Acetylene work well with Propane/Butane and have been doing so for 20 years without issue.

Of course you shouldn't do this without being independently confident that it is safe to do so and if confident it is safe you shouldn't encourage others to do the same as their reasoning may not be sound enough to evaluate their own situation, and then, of course there are those who have sat down too sharply, without the required PPE, on a cushion soaked in "Health and Safety" and inadvertently received an overdose 😀

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

An example here might be the all weather automatic landing system for aeroplanes.

The military adopted the system with a failure rate of 1 in 120,000 (where the pilot would retake the controls and abort the touchdown). For civil aviation use they needed to go from a simplex to a triplex system (where the landing would not be aborted as long as two of three computers were in agreement – and the errant one was ignored) to achieve a failure rate of better than 1 in 10 million.

What failure rate can we put on any cheap pressure regulator – when used for a different set of conditions? At Thurleigh, the pilots were highly trained to recognise any failure, or impending failure, but here we have personnel who may not have any training at all, but still operating with a potentially catastrophic outcome.

Competency cannot be transferred by simple forum postings.

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