Watching a tube get rolled in Gary, Indiana back in 2013 changed how I tack everything
I was on a shutdown job and this old hand showed me how he tacked a 6 inch header in 4 spots instead of 8, said the heat was gonna pull it anyway and 8 tacks just made it fight him. I still do it his way on anything under 8 inches and my fit ups come out straighter. Anybody else tack less than the book says or am I gonna get yelled at by the next QC guy?
Roll the dice if you want but that old hand was fitting pipe in 2013 and QC has gotten a lot stricter since then. The book calls for those tacks for a reason, and its not because some engineer wanted to make your life hard, its because they ran the numbers on how that pipe moves when it heats up. Yeah 4 tacks might pull straight on a bench test in the shop, but throw that header in a rack with real world stress on it and see what happens over time. If the next QC guy flags it and makes you cut and re-tack, you just cost the company a day of work to save yourself ten minutes. Do it by the book and let the old timers do it their way on their own jobs.