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Apprentice asked me why I still use a soapstone when lasers exist
Told him about the 1987 outage in Gary where every scribe mark vanished off wet steel and we lost a whole shift re-laying plates, so I asked him what happens when that laser battery dies at 3am, and he just stared at me.
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ellis.diana2mo ago
Honestly the thing nobody mentions is that soapstone marks are physically part of the surface, not a light projection. During the '87 outage the issue wasn't just the battery dying, it was that the lasers back then had zero backup and the whole digital layout system went dark with it. But even today, if a laser gets knocked out of calibration or the sensor picks up a stray reflection, you don't know if your mark is lying to you. With soapstone, you can run your glove over it and feel the line. That's a check no machine can give you.
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