Have you ever wondered who provides the answers to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on a company's web site? I have, and I have also wondered who answers the more difficult, infrequently asked questions. At AMERICAN, we are developing an FAQ section on our web site that will include technical questions and answers. This addition should prove valuable to our customers, but you will not lose the option of speaking with a Technical Services engineer to address specific technical concerns. Experience counts when out-of-the-ordinary circumstances exist in a piping project. Our current engineering technical staff associated with technical service and product development has a total of 224 years of experience. In addition to that, technicians who support our engineers have 177 years of experience. That's practical "hands-on" experience in civil, metallurgical, materials, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering, and six members of our staff have their professional engineering license. The use of Finite Element Analysis, strain gauge stress analysis, and our hydrostatic and beam load test facilities further enhance the ability of our Technical Services engineers to address technical issues. We frequently take new or prototype designs to failure to ensure that a substantial margin of safety is designed into each product. For questions that cannot be answered with our in-house testing capabilities, our strong relationships with the academic community can provide everything from electron microscope metallurgical analysis to flow testing of our products. Knowing the performance of our products at the extreme limits of their capabilities provides us the assurance that our recommendations to our customers are sound and logical. So what kind of questions do we receive? Here is a recent example: How many feet of 8-inch Flex-Ring® pipe can be pulled at one time in a Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) installation? This is a difficult and complex question but using pulling load limits of the joint, coefficient of friction, deflection angles, size of the bored hole, the application of appropriate safety factors, review of job site limitations, and our experience, we were able to provide a good estimate of the maximum length of the pull for this diameter on this project. (To answer the question I would have to say that the details of each job site have a large bearing on the answer but 700 feet or less has been a typical successful pull in tests we've done.) If you have a frequently or infrequently asked technical question regarding your pipe project, contact AMERICAN. Our Technical Services staff, which includes David Bynon, P.E., Randy Conner, P.E., Blake Beavers, P.E., Barry Sadler, or other engineers on our technical staff, will do its best to resolve your technical concerns.

People who like finding answers: the AMERICAN Technical Services staff, from left: Blake Beavers, David Bynon, Gene Oliver, Barry Sadler and Randy Conner