Our Sites

Good engineering, better metal fabrication

Engineering expertise drives growth at Royal Welding

A polisher finishes a customer component to a mirror finish.

It’s unusual to talk with a fabrication shop owner about a hemodynamic monitoring device. But considering Wallace Cook’s experience, it shouldn’t seem unusual at all. After all, he received a patent for such a device.

Before buying Royal Welding & Fabricating in 1985, at the time just a four-person operation, Cook spent years in other manufacturing and engineering roles, especially in the medical field. They included Edwards Lifesciences, which makes heart valves and pacemakers, and where he earned that patent for a hemodynamic monitoring device. Long before that he worked in Van Nuys, Calif., at Anheuser-Busch, and while there he worked with a custom fabricator called Royal Welding & Fabricating.

Fast-forward two decades, and Cook was looking for a small company to buy. He had been working on his own as an engineer for about a year. “I knew that being a one-man band wasn’t the way to go for me. It’s difficult to do design along with all the sales and marketing. So I started looking for a company to buy.”

He saw an ad in the newspaper about a business for sale. It was Royal Welding & Fabricating. The owner had died, as had the general manager—not a good situation. Essentially rudderless, the business trudged onward for a few years and lost money before finally being put on the market.

As Cook recalled, “I ended up buying it. There was absolutely no work in the shop, and no orders. The company had lost its ASME certification. So that’s what I started with.”

Royal Welding now has more than 30 employees working in Fullerton, Calif. The custom fabricator specializes in engineering and fabricating specialty heat exchangers, centrifugal pump vessels, agitators, autoclaves, cooking kettles, vacuum chambers, and more. Much of the shop’s work centers on a commonsense notion that has driven Cook since his days running his own engineering firm: Good products spring from good engineering.

For the Love of Engineering

Considering the shape Royal Welding was in when Cook bought the fabricator in 1985, what drew him to the business? “I bought the business because of the fact that it involved a lot of engineering. And I remembered the company having a good reputation.”

After he purchased the business, he received a list of Royal Welding’s past customers, started calling, and the orders started flowing in. As Cook recalled, “People would say, ‘Oh, I remember you guys. I was wondering what happened!’” Royal Welding’s good reputation, built up over the years, went a long way.

Cook then worked to get the organization recertified to ASME, which required a new quality control manual. “This was a godsend,” Cook said, “because I rewrote it the way I wanted to run the company.”

He drew from existing welding procedures and expanded on them. “At the time they had five weld procedures,” Cook said. “Now we have more than 50. Every material has its own weld procedure.”

This polished tank is designed with a dimpled jacket.

In the 1980s, shortly after Cook purchased the business, Royal Welding had no machining capability but instead contracted with local machine shops. This eventually included Target Tool, a machine shop that focused on tooling for the oil industry. In the early 1990s the owner was diagnosed with cancer, and his business partner died. After that the owner had planned to simply auction off equipment, if he couldn’t sell it first. The oil industry was flat at the time, so prospects didn’t look good.

But then Cook made an offer, the owner accepted, and Royal Welding then had the capabilities of a full-blown machine shop. The machining and fabrication operation eventually moved to its current facility in Fullerton, with 30,000 square feet under the roof and 2 acres of land. And that is where the company has remained for the past 25 years.

During this time sales have grown by more than 10 percent every year. Still, no matter how large Royal Welding grows, Cook said he intends to keep his emphasis on engineering. Specifically, he intends to employ one engineer for every $1 million in sales. Annual sales now are $4 million and, hence, the company has four engineers, Cook and three others.

A recently written procedure for a cryogenic vessel illustrates what kind of company Royal Welding has become. The procedure involves a HASTELLOY® material that will be in service at -320 degrees F. “That’s almost down to absolute zero,” Cook said.

As owner, Cook serves as chief engineer and designer. He develops the quote for a tank or other project and follows it through to completion—and this includes coming up with new ideas. In one sense, Cook has grown his business off of one phrase in the ASME fabrication codes. If a specific element is not described in the code, then a company can use “good engineering practice.”

“That was my green light to use my expertise,” Cook said. “My expertise is thinking outside the box. We’ve incorporated all sorts of new elements into our fabrications.”

Appreciation of O-rings

One of the first tanks Royal Welding built under Cook’s ownership, in the 1980s, was destined for a customer in the pharmaceutical industry. A copy of a tank the customer had previously, the design called for a bolted-on top using flat gaskets. The bolts had a maximum torque of 70 foot-pounds.

“We built it, and the thing leaked like a sieve,” Cook recalled, adding that even when the bolts were torqued down to their absolute maximum, the tank would fail the leak test under pressure. “That was the last time we worked with flat gaskets. We went to O-rings after that.”

In the 1980s O-rings weren’t quite as common as they are today, at least for the applications Royal Welding was targeting. Cook worked with a company that supplied the O-rings he needed and, true to his engineering self, learned about O-ring design. “The key is that a flat gasket requires compression force where an O-ring does not. An O-ring seals with no compression force. The head takes the internal pressure and forces the O-ring into the space.”

Put another way, while gaskets require force compressing downward toward the tank, O-rings seal using the force from inside the tank pressing outward.

Wallace Cook (left) and Gary Mergeanian, Suhner’s west coast sales manager, stand by a large tank shell.

Cook chuckled quietly. “It’s a beautiful design. I just love O-rings.”

That appreciation for elegant, often overlooked feats of engineering, like that of the simple O-ring, pretty much sums up Royal Welding’s approach to business over the past few decades.

Dimple Jackets

Cook appreciates good engineering and, more broadly, the potential for creativity that a custom fabricator like Royal Welding offers. Consider a conventional dimple jacket that surrounds a tank. The dimples are created by punching a hole and then, with a slightly larger die, forming an emboss so the dimple edge is about 0.25 in. away from the surface of the tank shell. These dimples are then welded in a regular pattern to attach the tank shell to the outside jacket.

ASME code requires each fabricator installing dimple plate to perform a proof test under pressure. “Every shop makes its own dimple plate, because it has to match your weld procedure,” Cook said.

Making the whole system work is the pressure put in between the tank and the dimple jacket. The pressure pushes against the inner shell and dimple jacket. A high-pressure system has dimples that are close together, while a low-pressure system has dimples that are farther apart.

Cook used a beer can analogy. An open can is easy to crush with one hand. But try and crush a closed beer can, and you’ll find it to be extraordinarily difficult. That’s the engineering elegance of pressure, both in the beer can and between the dimple jacket and tank shell at Royal Welding.

The Art of Polishing

The company now performs most fabrication and machining processes in-house, from milling and turning to plasma cutting, bending, and, of course, welding. But it does outsource some services, including the metal spinning for the tank and tank heads, as well as rolling of plate, sheet, and bar.

Like many custom operations, Royal seems to never need the same rolled cylinder twice. Customers may request a project based on a prior tank design, but it may have a new diameter, material grade, thickness, or length. So the company has a partnership with a nearby rolling firm. “It always comes back right,” Cook said. “Rolling is really an art.”

What makes a process an art, exactly? Much of it has to do with the interaction between the operator and the workpiece: the observation, constant monitoring, the tweaking to get it just right. Welding is such a process, of course, but so is polishing, a critical operation Royal performs in-house, and one that Cook doesn’t take for granted.

“Grinding and polishing isn’t easy,” Cook said. “It’s a combination of having the right equipment, the right grinding discs, and talent.”

The grinder that Royal Welding’s grinding and polishing department uses has a flex shaft that’s designed to give the operator more flexibility and cause less fatigue.

Grinding and polishing operators use off-the-shelf workpiece positioners, like tank rolls, but the company does have a custom, proprietary, rotating positioner and polisher for finishing the inside of heads. The positioner can be raised and tilted as well, so the polishing wheel (which is on the end of an arm) has access to the right surface areas at the right angle of attack.

The wheel traverses from the center of the head and follows the workpiece all the way to the edge.

Of course, as is common at many custom fabricators, defining a specific finish can be a challenge. Like some fabricators, Royal has samples of different grades of polish, as defined by the grit: 300-grit, 120-grit, and so on. It then has grinding and polishing procedures that start with a coarse grit and go down to finer grits.

“The ultimate inspection tool is a surface profilometer to actually measure the surface roughness,” Cook said. These include standards (Ra and RMS) that measure the average distance between the peaks and valleys of a surface finish. All this is designed to give an objective measure of a material’s surface.

Some Royal customers, including those in the pharmaceutical industry, require a polish that’s so bright that small pits emerge along with other imperfections from the rolling process at the mill. Those need to be filled in with weld metal, then ground and polished again to the right finish. And then the next order on the polisher’s docket might be a relatively inexpensive job without critical finishing requirements. In short, workers need to be flexible and follow the finishing strategy as dictated by the job in front of them.

“Polishing is such a critical operation for us,” Cook said. “It can sometimes cost more than the welding.”

He added that if the company didn’t invest in high-end finishing and grinding tools, the process would cost even more. These tools include Roto hand grinders from Suhner. Workers can perform abrasive, belt, and pad work with the same tool. Royal also incorporates flexible adapters that give workers greater freedom of movement, especially when working in confined spaces, such as inside large containment vessels.

“If you go buy cheap tools, they’ll more or less fall apart on you,” Cook said. “It just won’t last. Higher-end tools and supplies are worth the extra cost.”

Better tools mean better control, and that’s a good thing for any manufacturing process, be it machining or welding or polishing, and it’s of course a fundamental attribute of good engineering. It goes back to good engineering practice—the very reason Cook got into the custom metal fabrication business in the first place.

Images courtesy of Suhner Industrial Products Corp., Abrasive Power Tool Div., 706-235-8046, www.suhner-abrasive-expert.com.

Royal Welding & Fabricating, 714-680-6669, www.royalwelding.com
About the Author
The Fabricator

Tim Heston

Senior Editor

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-381-1314

Tim Heston, The Fabricator's senior editor, has covered the metal fabrication industry since 1998, starting his career at the American Welding Society's Welding Journal. Since then he has covered the full range of metal fabrication processes, from stamping, bending, and cutting to grinding and polishing. He joined The Fabricator's staff in October 2007.