Reply to "Soldering!"

gunrunnerjohn posted:

I've seen the solder puddles, I could tell you stories!  

How about someone using a pound of solder to sweat one faucet on, and failing to stop the leaks!   The little mountain of solder on the floor was something to behold.  Took him two hours to create it, took me about three minutes to fix the issue.

Yup - 

In my early days, I was doing electrical support for the refrigeration crew at Kodak. Witnessed a good one. 

Crew was installing a new environmental chamber, and part of the job was to run vertical freon lines to the condenser on the roof. Lines were 1 inch and 3 inches or thereabouts. Rule of thumb for pipefitters is that you need enough wire solder to go around the joint once, so soldering 3 inch copper pipe needs about 9 - 10 inches of solder per joint. New helper was given the job. After working a few hours on the first joint he went for another 5 lb roll of solder... problem was, all the excess dripped into the pipe, and they couldn't risk having all that loose stuff in the system, so they had to pull piping out until they could find and account for the first roll of solder.... Wasn't ordinary solder either, it was one of the high-strength ones refrigeration guys use.

A lot of screaming and hollering ensued.