Steel Construction Vol 40 No 2 - Tubular Steel Feature | Page 20

SAISC FEATURE

Tubular construction
takes a giant leap forward with the advent of laser
and plasma profiling equipment
By Spencer Erling, Education Director, SAISC

Do you remember the days when tube to
tube connections were a nightmare?
For those of you from younger generations
you may be wondering... “Now what is
Spencer on about?”.
Let me explain the process of old. I will try
to keep it short and to the point.
In the good old days before we had 3 D
packages like Tekla that could develop
the end intersections of a tube to tube
connection, on a good old (dinosaurs)
drawing board, a slide rule and maybe a
calculator in later days, a draughtsman or a
well-trained boilermaker would set about
with pencil on (tracing) paper to develop
such a connection.
In my first year of studies in civil
engineering at Wits circa 1963 we were
required (punished? Inflicted?) to do
Mechanical Engineering Drawing 1, where

Oblique T piece – unequal diameter cylindrical pipes

18 Steel Construction Vol. 40 No. 2 2016

such monstrosities were the subject matter
of the day. For those who know me you
will surely recall the appallingly untidy
drawings I produced and with experience
never really improved, you will realise this
was not my best subject (see figures 1 and
2 below).
Just to make sure new students really
battled the question would involve
something nasty like the below oblique
unequal diameter angled intersection.
I guess only one person hated this process
more than us students did, and that was
our poor demonstrator (no, not the ToyiToying type!) including none other than
the well-known Selwyn Tucker of Process
Pipe Company (clearly he learnt quite a lot
about pipes in his mechanical engineering
studies!).
The objective of such exercises was the
development template of “branch A” drawn