Tulsa Calibration : Really Great
Nate: [inaudible 00:00:00] Having a great time today doing some Tulsa calibrations podcasting. I’m pretty excited about the fact that we’ve got this-
Speaker 2: You don’t sound very excited, Nate.
Nate: Well, yeah. I’m kind of monotone, I don’t know. Just kind of got this steady flow voice.
Speaker 2: Mono, mono, mono.
Nate: Not too much enthusiasm. Probably if I had some gauge blocks in front of me, and if I had some micrometers or something in front of me, I probably would be acting a little bit more excited, but right now, just talking into the microphone.
Speaker 2: You are like a kind in the chocolate factory when you start doing your calibrations. I’ve never seen the joy and the sparkle in somebody’s eye whenever the word Tulsa calibrations comes up. You’re like a squirrel with a shiny thing. Squirrel.
Nate: Squirrel.
Speaker 2: But there’s a lot to be excited about calibrations. Tulsa calibrations is a … It’s a heck of a world, it’s a heck of a market. We are one of the center corners of the United States oil and natural gas market.
Nate: There is a lot of oil and gas in this area.
Speaker 2: The things that happen with our calibrations, not just Tulsa calibrations, it has profound effect all over the world. The amount of natural gas that we’re able to produce for the world coming out of Oklahoma and Texas and up in the Dakotas, few of the other shelves, is just astronomical.
Nate: So what are some of these companies, man, that are pumping all this oil out of the ground and all the fracking going on and whatnot. What are they doing with their equipment? They use some really high pressure when they do that fracking, don’t they?
Speaker 2: Oh, they most certainly do.
Nate: Yeah, it’s hundred thousands or something, I don’t know.
Speaker 2: I don’t know what the pressure is. I have been out there on site with those fracking companies. I’ve actually seen them hook up the manifolds and the pump trucks and the pods and the mixers and start pumping down holes, and let me tell you what. If you’re in Tulsa doing calibrations and you want to see some major pressure build up, you want to go out to one of those fracking sites. The average site that I went on had no less than 10 pump trucks. So that don’t mean nothing to a lot of people reading this, so let’s just put it this way. 10 semi trucks lined up in a line, all connected to one manifold, and the whole semi truck, the trailer, is nothing but a ginormous caterpillar pump. So imagine hooking 10 of these up to one ginormous manifold creating an unbelievable amount of pressure and just pumping down hole.
Nate: I think I’d be pretty nervous to be standing around that place, man. I think I’d be really nervous. It’s kind of like when you get close to these furnaces, which by the way, Precision Calibrations also does furnace calibrations. Furnace calibrations, oven calibrations, temperature controller calibrations, chart recorder calibrations, and all those things. But I’ll tell you, man. I’d be standing around there … I was somewhere, I can’t remember now where I was, but they had this really high pressure on this vessel, and I was kind of nervous standing around it. I was thinking myself, “Man, this is like a big old bomb. If something went wrong, it’d probably kill everybody around.”
Speaker 2: So it sounds like that company was probably being pretty diligent by having a good calibration company to do their Tulsa calibrations for them.
Nate: Now that you mention, they had gauge calibrations right there, as a matter of fact, that were showing the exact pressure of this vessel, and I know they had to have gauge calibrations and pressure gauge calibrations done.
Speaker 2: It’s important when our customers send us their pressure gauges that they’re right. That we do a great job, that we provide quality work every time, because sometimes that pressure gauge is hooked up to a soaker hose in a furnace that’s just letting a little bit of water out every hour, causing a bunch of problems that it doesn’t need to create. And sometimes, it’s on a huge pressure valve that makes your butthole pucker up just a little bit when the needle’s over to the right.
Nate: Yeah, especially when it starts maxing up and getting into the red. That’s [inaudible 00:04:14] scary.
Speaker 2: It’s important to know that you’re really in the red and not 500 Psi over the red, huh?
Nate: Yeah, because it gets a little scary for sure.
Speaker 2: And that’s the kind of reliability and confidence you can have in any kind of work that comes out of Precision Calibrations because if we send you something back, it’s good. And if it ain’t good, well there’s a big old red sticker on it with some lolly gums and some gummy bears stuck all over in every hole to make sure that you can’t get anything in it. And if that doesn’t do it, sometimes we pour chocolate on the stuff just to make sure you don’t use it again.
Nate: Chocolate can be a scary thing. It’s got the wrong people in the office there. Well, I better not be too specific. I don’t want to stereotype, but you know-
Speaker 2: There are a lot of chocolate haters.
Nate: There are some chocolate haters.
Speaker 2: And chocolate indulgers.
Nate: There are some chocolate indulgers, yes there is.
Speaker 2: Would you say that they should be calibrated?
Nate: Maybe. Let’s just say it keeps us in business when we’re doing scale calibrations. And also, Precision Calibrations is … As a matter of fact, we do accredited scale calibrations. This is something that we’ve worked really hard for to obtain the proper equipment, proper calibration equipment, proper standards, calibration standards, and now we are an accredited lab that does accredited pressure and scale calibrations. Pressure calibrations.
Speaker 2: So if I understand you correctly, you’re telling me that you can give a high level of confidence in making sure that if I have you check a scale, that that scale is reading right?
Nate: That is absolutely right, that is absolutely correct. So when we do scale calibrations, we are using certified weights that are certified, NIST traceable, which is important that we be NIST traceable. And we using these certified weights to check your scales to make sure that whatever you’re weighing is absolutely correct, that you know exactly what you’ve got on there. That’s based on standards that have been around ever since the beginning of time.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you something. So if you’re doing a Tulsa calibration and you’re doing a scale calibration that happens to be a Tulsa calibration, what do you normally see? Let me be a little bit more specific. You just walk into my company and I’m going to have you check my shipping scale, all right. It’s a 300 pound scale, zero to 300 pounds of increments, it’s got a readability of one pound. In your experience if you’re doing a Tulsa calibration on that scale, do you expect to see a zero when you walk up? Is it abnormal if you see a number? Is it okay to just tear it? Do you find that scales, after they’ve been used and weights have gone all the way up to their max, that they don’t go back to zero?
Nate: There’s so many different types of scales, and the scale calibrations, they are so important. But there’s so many different types of scales, so to answer your question though, in shipping and receiving, I’ve seen some scales that are just maybe five or 10 pounds because these guys are just putting on envelopes or something or little boxes or something, but I’ve seen other scales that are like thousands of pound scales, so whenever they take the pressure off of the scale, yeah you’re supposed to should be saying zero, but sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know, these things just get abused and used a lot, so sometimes it’s not always zero.
For the most part, you have certain accuracies and tolerances to that, and if it’s not reading zero, it’s not necessarily a problem. It doesn’t necessarily automatically make it a problem. The higher the scale reads, the more that it can be off of zero and probably don’t need to be alarmed about it. If it’s a real Precision scale and it’s not zeroing correctly, then I guess you’d probably need to look into and make sure. The way to do that would be call Precision Calibrations by just looking up Tulsa calibrations and there we are, and a technician comes out, takes a look at it, and puts on certified weights to do your scale calibration, and then you’ll know if you have a good scale or not.
Speaker 2: So if I hearing you correctly, if I want to get a scale calibrated, which means I’ll be doing a Tulsa calibration or a calibration in Tulsa I guess, depending on how you want to look at it, no matter what that scale is, whether it’s a gram scale or a pound scale or kilogram scale, no matter if it re-zeros or it doesn’t zero, I heard you telling me you were accredited. So that tells me that you know how to handle every one of those situations based off the customer’s needs and guidelines.
Nate: We have years and years of experience working with different scales and making it very reliable. When we do a calibration, a Tulsa calibration for scale calibrations, you can rest your head at night knowing that you are in good hands, that your scale is working correctly. What time are we stopping this podcast today?
Speaker 2: Well, if we’re going to do a Tulsa calibration, we’re going to have to stop this podcast by 41:14, but if we don’t want to do a Tulsa calibration and we want to do a Claremore calibration or maybe a Precision Calibration …
Nate: Or pressure calibration.
Speaker 2: Or pressure calibration.
Nate: Or scale calibration.
Speaker 2: Or scale … But probably a Tulsa calibration. We’re probably going to want to stop that Tulsa calibration at 41:14.
Nate: Okay, all right. Well I’ll tell you what, it’s been fun and so we’ve done some serious calibrating today in this conversation, and I look forward to having some more calibration conversations.