FABTECH and metal fabrication’s future

Hernán Luis y Prado, founder of Workshop for Warriors, presents during the FABx keynote on the first day of FABTECH.

FABTECH is here; so is Veteran’s Day. And as it does every time the dates coincide, the two seem to go together extraordinarily well.

At this morning’s keynote, dubbed FABX Talks, modeled after TED Talks, various speakers took the stage, veterans all. One of the was Hernán Luis y Prado, founder and CEO of Workshop for Warriors, a fabricating, welding, and machining trade school dedicated to veterans. “I was seeing more of my friends die of drugs and overdoses in San Diego more than of bullets and bombs in Baghdad. So I decided to do something about it.”

And so in 2008 he launched Workshop for Warriors, a school that’s undergoing major expansion. At its heart, the school trains military veterans to work with industry veterans in welding, fabricating, and machining.

The school was recently named one of the best welding schools in the nation by the American Welding Society. It has near perfect job placement rate, and it’s in the middle of a major expansion, the long-term goal being to establish more than 100 similar facilities across the country.

What makes Workshop for Warriors so successful? Its leadership has something to do with it, of course. But it also might have something to do with how the military trains its people who focus on process and strive for perfection. Knowledge isn’t undocumented and tribal. It’s visualized and documented.

“Visualize. Describe. Direct.”

So said fellow FABx keynote speaker Michael Walton, industry solutions executive at Microsoft who has been leading the company’s efforts in cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence. “Many think such technology is only for the big guys,” he said, “but it’s just not true.”

Just last week Walton visited a small plate galvanizer. Until recently, the shop relied on its veteran employees to achieve a consistent coating. Now, using sensors and cameras, the company can actually see how the zinc particles adhered to the material surface, and through that they discovered how to achieve complete, consistent coverage, and ultimately save the company more than $1.2 million. Walton said that AI allowed this small shop to visualize—to see the process in its entirety—describe that process fully, then direct toward improvement.

“It used to be about the knowledge of the tribe,” he said. “Now, it’s science.”

That comment rings true throughout the show floors of McCormick Place, where companies are presenting new ways of visualizing, documenting, and describing the process. For instance, Veo Robotics has used vision technology to allow humans to work alongside conventional robots productively, safely, and without barriers. Laser cutting machine makers have introduced new ways of manipulating the fiber laser beam to make the produces more productive, repeatable, and, not least, practical for part-pick-and-place automation.

Then there’s MetaLi LLC, a startup founded by Prof. Xiaochun Li at UCLA that has introduced welding filler metal infused with nanoparticles that “self-disperse” in such a way to make the process scalable.

The technology, according to the company, effectively makes the unweldable weldable, with ceramic nanoparticles dispersed in such a way as to prevent postweld cracking. The technology is also being used in “super powders” for 3-D printing, but the theory behind the technology has grand implications. Imagine a day in which, thanks to strategically placed nanoparticles, sheet metal is made with absolutely uniform grains and a structure tailored for optimal cutting and forming.

With material that consistent, imagine the levels of precision and repeatability that could be achieved. Such science might make tribal knowledge on the shop floor a thing of the past.