Supplying gas to your metalworking applications can be complicated, especially if the gas needs to reach multiple locations. If you are looking for cost savings and productivity gains, consider installing gas cylinders at one main location and controlling them with a basic manifold or switchover manifold. With this method you won’t need to worry about cylinders running out of gas.

Nuclear power plants use a lot of water to cool the reactors, and when the water intake unit occasionally pulls in a sea lion or a shark, environmentalists go nuts. Dimic Steel Tech bid on a contract to build two huge grates for Southern California Edison to keep marine life out of the water intakes, and had to learn a bit about welding corrosion-resistant steel along the way.

For tube and pipe producers, testing the product on the mill is necessary, but not necessarily optimal. The line speed might be too slow, the mill might have some maintenance issues, and other factors can interfere with online testing. For these reasons, many supplement the online test with an offline test.

Blasting cleaning can be done by either a rotating wheel or an air nozzle, with a variety of abrasive media depending on the surface finish needed. The machines come in five formats: skew roll, multibar, upblast, downblast, and airblast. Understanding the types of machine available and how they work is the first step in deciding which type is needed for your particular applications.

Because of inherent advantages, high-powered solid-state fiber and disk lasers now account for 20 to 25 percent of the industrial laser market. The laser’s exceptional beam quality, however, has presented some challenges in materials processing. Fortunately, proper head design can help deliver successful production results.

Bending large sheet metal parts does not represent the majority of work for most metal fabricators, but it can be a significant portion for those shops that have the capability to do it. These equipment considerations and processing tips can help make a big bending job easier to accomplish.

Country music legend Willie Nelson is credited with saying, “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." It’s unlikely that Willie was reflecting on manufacturing. Regardless, his quote still summarizes perfectly one of the greatest challenges sheet metal fabricators face: When nesting, is it better to be early, or just in time?

Star Precision Fabricating, Houston, has always had hardware insertion capabilities since it opened its doors in the early 1990s. It has added more machines as the need for additional capacity has emerged. The latest automated equipment addition is making a huge difference in the speed at which it processes assembly work.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a proven means to track the effectiveness of production machinery, but its application in short-run, high-mix contract manufacturing has lagged somewhat given the difficulty in implementing it in its traditional manual form. Automatic data collection can help to overcome these obstacles, however.

The 2013 What Keeps You Up at Night? survey of The FABRICATOR readership reveals that fabricators are taking steps to ensure that recent growth is not a short-term occurrence, but a long-term trend.

Maintaining a boiler system can be very expensive and require a lot of downtime for the equipment. The electric arc wire thermal spray process is one efficient way to create a protective overlay on boiler components and systems, helping to reduce replacement costs and outage times.

In a modern-day manufacturing environment where the goal is to keep processes uncomplicated and repeatable, temperature-indicating products used in the welding process make a lot of sense.

Alabama metal artist captures the essence of celebrities, political figures, and influential historical figures with his 3-D metal pop portraits.

According to the inaugural Forming & Fabricating Job Shop Consumption Report, released in July, business isn’t horrible, but it’s not gangbusters either.