99 Diseases of Pressure Equipment: Repair Welds

Repair welds can be another undetected and insidious "fabrication defect" that eventually results in equipment failure. Any experienced metallurgist that has completed numerous failure analyses over the years will tell you that periodically they see failures that initiated at the site of a repair weld. Sometimes those repair welds are field repairs, but not infrequently they occurred during original fabrication and were unknown to the purchaser. Typically our standards and specifications do not cover repairs completed by the fabricator, so they believe they are free to do whatever they want to repair a manufacturing or fabrication defect, then grind it flush, finish the fabrication and ship the product.