LNG vessel heat treatment coupon substitution and testing failure

Same case as above, framed from the testing-circumvention angle. Tom presents this as a generalizable pattern of how shipyards game qualification testing.

Now guess what the shipyard did. This was a big problem — even more tests that had to be done. The last thing they wanted was to pass more qualification tests. There was variability in the steel plate. Bethlehem Steel at that time — the base metal would meet 20 foot-pounds 70% of the time when it came out of the mill on first pass. You didn't want to scrap 30% of your steel. So they'd send it back through a heat-treatment furnace — in this case a normalization furnace, where you heat it up to upper critical and slowly cool it without quenching, and you get a finer grain size, and it should give you better toughness.