Podcast Episode 134

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Beyond the Squeeze Test: How Unseen Variables Cost Farmers

Beyond the Squeeze Test: How Unseen Variables Cost Farmers

Episode 134 | 21 min

With Guest:

Paul Schrupp, Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement of Prinsco

In part two of the Perspectives on Pipe Quality series, host Jamie Duininck talks with Paul Schrupp, Director of Quality and Continuous Improvement at Prinsco, about the often unseen factors that determine whether pipe performs for decades or fails in the field.

They discuss why a simple squeeze test can give false confidence, how wall thickness distribution and corrugation design impact performance, and why temperature extremes expose weaknesses in pipe quality. Paul also explains the role of resin science, carbon black for UV protection, and ASTM testing in building products that meet and exceed expectations.

The conversation makes one thing clear: quality is not about doing the minimum. It is about building pipe that farmers can rely on, pipe that delivers long-term value, protects investments, and supports rural communities for generations.

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We could go get five different samples of pipe and squeeze it… But the distribution of one of those pipes could be significantly off… If you don’t have the right material selection on something, it can be detrimental.

— Paul Schrupp

Guest Bio

Paul Schrupp is the Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement at Prinsco and has been with the company for nearly 10 years. During that time, he’s worked in a variety of roles that gave him firsthand experience with manufacturing, process improvement, and product performance in the field. Today, he leads Prinsco’s quality systems with a focus on resin management, wall thickness distribution, cold-weather performance testing, and ASTM compliance.

Paul Schrupp (00:00):

Too much can go wrong, especially during high volume times of the year like we’re going to be getting into. That’s where the material science comes into play and the blending technology and really having an understanding of what all these different ingredients do. When things aren’t done right, it can leave us a poor mark on all of us. The more knowledge that we can share with contractors and customers, I think a good thing for the world.

Jamie (00:35):

Well, welcome back to The Water Table Podcast as we continue our series on why quality pipe and quality tile matters. Today I am interviewing Paul Schrupp. Paul is Director of Quality at Prinsco and Continuous Improvement, and wanted to just talk about quality and resins and corrugated pipes, specifically single wall pipe, Paul. So welcome. I think this is your first time on The Water Table.

Paul Schrupp (01:03):

First time. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Jamie.

Jamie (01:06):

Sorry you’re terribly nervous to join the worldwide podcast, but thanks for being part of it and this will be fun. It’ll be fun. This has been a fun series so far to just explore quality and our products that are manufactured for the corrugated pipe industry and specifically the agricultural industry. So talk to me a little bit about standards, a little bit about, maybe start with what you do as director of quality, and you’ve been doing that for quite some time now, five years or longer.

Paul Schrupp (01:44):

Maybe just to touch over five years for sure.

Jamie (01:47):

So talk to me a little bit about that and I can ask some questions.

Paul Schrupp (01:50):

Sure, and maybe I’ll back up even further with us just celebrating our 50th year, there were many people in front of me along the way that were mentors to me or people that built a lot of the Prinsco quality system in place and had a seat at the table, whether it be with AASHTO or whether it would be with ASTM, really doing the right thing for the industry and ultimately the end user. So really my role as the director of quality is really focused on doing the right things when it comes to managing resin, managing the product coming off of the line, so making sure that thicknesses and weights and perforation and those characteristics are managed well.

And then once the product gets out to the yard that we’re handling and moving that product in the right way and delivering it to the customer to ensure it’s going to function and exceed their expectations. So there’s a lot of different ways that we can go with that where some of the technology that we have to use the right resins, whether it’s recycled material or whether it’s virgin materials or some of the tools and testing frequencies that we exceed industry expectations to make sure that our product is what it says it is. But there’s a lot of different jumping off points that we could go.

Jamie (03:21):

And I think we’re specifically talking about resins, and that is a big part of… It’s your base compound, it’s what you’re starting with. And if you don’t have good resin, you’re going to probably not have good pipe. But there are other things, and maybe let’s jump off there and then come back to resins. But when it comes to a quality product around thicknesses and around perforations, and a lot of that is on distribution of thicknesses can cause you some challenges and talk a little bit about that, explain that. And then what we do to ensure proper distribution and thicknesses

Paul Schrupp (04:05):

For sure, from a quality system standpoint, these ASTM standards and the committees that develop them really put together, “Hey, how often do you need to test these things?” Where it may be once per day, it may be once per week, it may be once per… I’m going to use this blend for two weeks and I just need to check it once. Really what we do is take that information and go through a risk scenario right on. Is that enough given the type of equipment and technology that we have? And really since I’ve been here, Prinsco has really taken the approach that we’re going to do more than the minimum that’s required.

And not just to say that we’re that much better, but it’s really a risk mitigation strategy for us where too much can go wrong, especially during high volume times of the year like we’re going to be getting into where sometimes that pipe’s not sitting in the yard very long before it gets to the end user. So we can’t really wait to go through some of that testing on thickness or parallel plate testing to make sure the strength of the pipe exceeds ASTM requirements. So making sure that whether it’s the distribution circumferentially around the pipe is good, right? Because brittleness is a concern in the fuel, especially as it gets cold. That’s something that we test to and do material characterization to make sure we’re in that good spot.

Jamie (05:39):

Just interrupting you a minute, but some of that is material that creates brittleness, but some of it also is distribution. You got too thick and one side of the pipe and it’s cold and you’re bending it to go down a boot of a plow. You could have great resin in there and just have the distribution off that’s creating that cracking.

Paul Schrupp (06:01):

100%. I mean, we could go lay five different samples of pipe down here and go squeeze it, and that’s a test sometimes that’s real and meaningful that carries weight, but the distribution of one of those pipes could be significantly off. And when you go feel it like that, you’re not going to know you have a break potentially in the boot that’s going to create a gap in the field and you’re not going to find that wet spot until next year. It may be a couple years down the road. I mean, that’s the risk that we face and making sure that as an industry and as manufacturers, we’re all following the same set of rules and being able to speak to customers or regions on, “Hey, here’s exactly what this standard means is important because it can get confusing if you’re not familiar with it.” And the more knowledge that we can share with contractors and customers I think is a good thing for the world.

Jamie (07:02):

And I just want to again regress a little bit, but last episode Tony talked about this and you’re talking about two kind of on the thumb test or the hand test of just taking the pipe in your hands, a four-inch pipe and squeezing it and just examining it with your hands and your eyes and seeing if it’s good. And sometimes you can tell a lot by that. But the other thing that I think is just good to know for people is the corrugation pattern and the profile of that corrugation can make something feel stronger than it is or make it feel maybe a little bit weaker if you’re just looking at it from a thumb test than it actually is. And also in certain temperatures, some manufacturers that I know of perform really well when it’s 80, 85 degrees out just because of their profile.

And that same product might not perform real well when it’s 25 or 35 degrees in November and vice versa. So it isn’t all about just the thumb test. You can tell some things, but I think I wanted to share that because I think I want to encourage people to be a little bit careful with that and examine it in different ways by talking to their manufacturer, the salespeople asking those types of questions around profile, why is their profile the way it is? Why did they design it that way? What is their expectations of that? Because it’s one of those things where you can’t have absolutely everything, right? I mean, if it’s 90 degrees, your pipe is going to perform different than if it’s at zero. But as a manufacturer, you have to be ready for as much of that as you can because at zero, your product is much more likely to crack if you have the wrong resin properties. And they’re also much more likely to crack if you have a certain profile.

Paul Schrupp (09:02):

Exactly. And I think the example, and we actually use this in a lot of our training with team members too, if they don’t have experience with plastics, is especially here in Minnesota, you go put a plastic chair out on your back deck and you use it around the 4th of July and it’s pretty nice. You go do that in the middle of January when it’s negative 50 out, you’re probably going right through it. And could you design that plastic chair to be more accommodating, probably, but it’s still going to be too cold in the middle of January.

And that’s where the material science comes into play and the blending technology and really having an understanding of what all these different ingredients do for the end user or to the pipe, it takes time, it takes investment, it takes the right people with the right information to be able to bring that into really our quality system and industry. And I’m pretty confident that Prinsco is leading that front on using those types of materials and understanding what those material streams are. So I didn’t figure that out. A lot of people before me did, but it takes a lot. It’s tough to learn it overnight for sure.

Jamie (10:24):

Yeah. I think what we talked about now is when you talk about distribution and cracking pipe and cold weather, those are all things that you kind of know when they’re happening. I mean, it is very rare in my career that I’ve heard of small diameter single wall pipe collapsing from just being that light of pipe or something very, very rare as it happened. Sure it does. And it’s not as rare on cracking. I think every manufacturer, they’d be lying if they said they didn’t have that problem here or there. Usually that’s when it’s cold out. But the one thing that we don’t know is when there’s resin properties where it goes in the ground well, everything is fine and you move on to the next job, but because you can’t see it with your eyes, you don’t know what the resin properties that were used for that product to know, are we going to get the kind of service life?

Are we going to get a couple of generations, 50 years on our storm sewer side? We’re using resins and we are approved in states like Florida for a hundred year service life, agricultural products a little bit different, but 50 year service life. But let’s just talk about that a little bit because that’s something that you wouldn’t know when you’re putting it in what you really have, it might seem like the best pipe you ever got.

Paul Schrupp (11:55):

Absolutely. And one of the examples that came out is just understanding carbon black characteristics. It’s like why is pipe generally black and generally it comes from the carbon black that manufacturers are adding to it to make sure that when it’s sitting in a yard, whether it’s print skill yard or distribution yard or behind somebody’s shed that the sun’s beaten down on it. And if you don’t have that right material selection on something as what we view as simple as carbon black, it can be detrimental to your point where that traceability back to that blend and how it’s going to perform based on all these other sets of data, it’s for sure important to assess and understand because you can see things that are built from the ground up with pipe. You don’t know what you don’t know because it’s buried.

Jamie (12:51):

Yep. And in our industry, typically the pipe moves at a pace in which we’re not seeing several birthdays on pipe, but we can get a year or two years and it’s probably fine, but we have had samples of product, whatever, or a lot of times I hear this around a tree or around a mailbox or on a fence for a baseball field or something that’s sitting there. And if that’s been there several years and you actually manipulate that pipe, which most people don’t, it’s different than the stuff that’s new. And it’s different because the sun has degraded that pipe to the point in which it would not be a good product put in the ground.

Paul Schrupp (13:38):

For sure, for sure.

Jamie (13:40):

So let’s talk standards a little bit. Standards that this is something the world that you live in kind of daily, but tell me about the standards that affect the agricultural side of our industry and how we go about meeting those.

Paul Schrupp (13:58):

Yeah, for sure. In the single wall side, ASTM really governs that space with F667. So it has test method call out. It has resin requirements there. It has finished product expectations that that pipe needs to meet. And just knowing what we know about that standard, it’s been around for a while, it takes on different shapes and forms as the ASTM committees get together once a year and talk about, “Hey, do we want to leave it? Do we want to change it? Do we want to put it through a ballot review?” And Prinsco has representation there to make sure we have a seat at that table to make sure that we agree for our customers and for our business and livelihood.

So that’s a big one. On the flexible dual wall side, again, we led the charge on really building that 3390 specification for flexible dual wall, really taking what used to be like a single wall product, putting a liner in it and having it meet the stiffness requirements as a 20-foot dual wall stick-up pipe. So those standards are all built into our control plans where our teams right now are managing and making decisions based on, “Hey, are we meeting those expectations and making changes when necessary?”

Some of those are more challenging than others. You mentioned design. Design has a lot to do with that, and we factor that in when we go through FMEA analysis, when new tooling needs come up. But those standards, I’m by no means the expert on them. I got a great team of people that could recite them probably if they were sitting right behind me, but they’re really the building block for us to build design and build our control plans to do what’s right.

Jamie (15:55):

So when you think about, Paul, one thing we talked about was, we talked about often on The Water Table and I talked about in the last episode in this series, is just really about the longevity of our product and how it builds wealth on a farm. And for the family, the farm family that installs our product, they’re going to see a gain right away from that product. And then that gain is going to continue year after year after year. And that’s what I think drives a lot of us in this industry to be part of it because it’s an exciting place to be where you know you’re helping financially, the people that you’re selling stuff to. How as a director of quality would you voice your concerns when it comes to the whole banking and lending apparatus of our industry and how a lot of farmers have really strong connections to their local bank? And if you were at the county fair, which might happen later this week, and a banker came up to you and said, “Well, I know what you do.” How should I think about this? What would your response be?

Paul Schrupp (17:09):

No, that’s a great question. And a lot of that hits home personally for me with roots in agriculture and roots in banking. And I think we have a great story to tell, and a lot of things can get, not necessarily misconstrued, but they’re important details. You think about the average family farm, which those are shrinking right now, and how much of an investment managing water on the farm is for somebody like that needs to be done, right? So we talk about longevity of products, whether it’s 50 or 100. There’s examples of like, well, what about the gasket? How do we make sure that those gaskets have the right material selection and testing that’s done upon them so that the pipe doesn’t outlast the gasket? I mean, if the gasket fails, we got problems on the farm, or even in the stormwater market too.

So I think when we talk about being data-driven at Prinsco and how we apply that to our quality systems and ensuring that our products are going to last for X number of years, the world is counting on it. I mean, the last thing we want, as manufacturers have egg on our face when a mistake happens, but competition’s a good thing from a worldview standpoint on having competition, but when things aren’t done right, it can leave us a poor mark on all of us. So that’s how I think about it. And I think we got a great story to share with the banking community and the agricultural community too.

Jamie (19:00):

Yeah, and again, just when you look at it from the standpoint of what our products can do, and the market has gone on enough years now, and with corrugated plastic pipe advent in the ’60s of corrugated plastic drainage been around a lot longer than that. But then the advent of the yield monitor in the ’90s of people just understanding the value that’s created with it, that’s there, that’s already there.

And I think this series wants to just expose the idea that if that value is there, it really is upon you to put in a high quality product that’s highly respected that the manufacturer, you know, you trust, they’ll stand behind it because there is things that go wrong, but for the most part, there’s going to be very few instances where this is going to go wrong so that you and your family can see the benefit of that, the financial benefit of that for years and years to come. And also not knowing where our regulatory industry is going to go. Are we going to be able to do the same things we do today in the future? You want it done right, so you get as many years out of it as possible.

Paul Schrupp (20:11):

Absolutely.

Jamie (20:13):

Good. Paul, thanks for joining me on The Water Table today and first time, but hopefully we can have you back.

Paul Schrupp (20:20):

Yeah, would love to come back and appreciate the opportunity.

Jamie (20:23):

Appreciate it, Paul. Thanks.

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