Crescent wrench

Because I ve been attending self-improvement seminars and reading these types of books since I was 13 years old, I have seen many theories on personal change. I have found that handwriting analysis always ranks in the top five of the most useful tools. It s like a crescent wrench in your toolbox. You can use it for so many different situations. But, handwriting analysis is just one of an assortment of amazing mental tools I will teach and reference in this book. 

Other tools you will need for HPLC are fairly standard for a lab with a few exceptions. I keep two of the small open wrenches supplied with an HPLC system or a column for use with compression fittings, 1/4-in, a 5/8-in box wrench, and a 6-in crescent wrench for column work, a file, a Terry tool tubing cutter, a couple of pairs of blunt nose pliers for tube flexing during cutting, a reversible screw driver, a jeweler s screwdriver for phoenix block s screws, a universal Allen wrench set, an adjustable-head dental mirror (for seeing behind boxes to hook up leads), and a stopwatch for timing flow. The key is to lock up your tool kit to prevent tool evaporation. 

Operator-based maintenance began with the entrepreneurial spirit of the cottage industry in the U.S. free enterprise system. In most cases, the owners fixed the sawmills, the cotton gins, the printing presses, and the wagon wheels. Owners were the skilled crafts people working within a free enterprise culture and system. For many Americans, OEM started with Henry Ford s Model T, which came with tools—a crescent wrench, slip-joint pliers, screwdriver, and hammer, and so on—for the do-it-yourself repairs. 

There are several performance characteristics of microcomputer-based laboratory instruments that make them useful tools analogous to the Crescent wrench ... 

Needle-nose pliers Phillips screwdriver Crescent wrench Utility knife Wire brush... 

As you modify your chain, measure the length of the top plate of the cutters to make sure that they are all exactly the same. You can use a crescent wrench or caliper for a gauge. 

Contract maintenance workers often will not replace the tray manways unless the tray manway is adjacent to a tower external manway. They reason that once the tray manways that are visible from the tower manway are closed, there is no way for someone to inspect the other trays. This problem is not just common— it is imiversal. The maintenance force at the Good Hope Refinery pulled this nasty trick on me at the coker fractionator. Equipped with my crescent wrench, I opened the tray internal manway below the side tower manway. 1 discovered that the 12 trays below this point had their manways stacked in their downcomers. In 1990,1 worked on a project to improve fractionation at the Chevron Refinery crude distillation unit in El Segundo, California. When the tower was opened to implement my design, the tray manways were found lying on the tray decks below the diesel draw tray. The lesson is, inspect each tray and then witness the closure of each tray manway, separately. 

The situation on a trayed tower is far more controllable. Even after the tray assembly is complete, the process engineer, using only a crescent wrench, can open a few tray deck manways and doublecheck the tower internals. But to pull 6 ft of packing out of a tower is a major undertaking. Also, trays can be stepped on without damage. Beam supports and 40-lb air guns can be dragged across a sieve tray... 

Okay. It s not your fault. Some idiot connected the pilots to dirty fuel gas, rather than natural gas. But why didn t you clean out the little spud inside the pilot light It only needs a crescent wrench to do the job in two minutes."... 

About 5 percent of the trayed towers have old style bubble-cap trays. Dirt and coke tends to accumulate under the cap. This cannot be seen unless the cap is removed. Coke underneath the bubble will restrict the vapor flow, increase vapor AP and promote downcomer backup and flooding, it only takes a moment to unscrew a bubble-cap using a crescent wrench. The maintenance folks will usually clean the deck, but not remove the caps. Liz injured herself crawling through a manway helping me discover this problem at the Motiva Refinery visbreaker fractionator in Convent, Louisiana. This tower flooded on... 

The situation on a trayed tower is far more controllable. Even after the tray assembly is complete, the process engineer, using only a crescent wrench, can open a few tray deck manways and double-check... 

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