What’s happening in tube and pipe industry? Get out of the office and see for yourself

Attendees at this year's Tube & Pipe conference in Memphis, Tenn., take a tour of the Big River Steel plant.

Regardless of the business you’re in, getting out of the office or the shop once in a while to see what’s going on in your industry is a good idea. New equipment, new processes, and new applications are always in a state of development. Making the rounds is the key to learning about the latest trends or getting ahead of them.

The Tube & Pipe Association, International, and its parent, the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, International, make it as easy as they can.

If you can imagine two full days of informative conference sessions, a steel plant tour, more than 15 vendors with tabletop displays, and four or five good networking opportunities, you can imagine the two associations’ latest conference and workshop—Pipe & Tube Memphis 2019 and the World-class Roll Forming Workshop—which were located together in Memphis a few weeks back.

The event was a gathering of 165 like-minded individuals who spent two days discussing metal fabrication challenges and solutions. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, so if you missed this one, you might want to keep a close eye on the news updates in The Tube & Pipe Journal so you’ll be ready when the next one comes around. As one in a series of conferences held in Pittsburgh in 2010, Nashville in 2012, Houston in 2014, and Charlotte in 2016, the next conference just might appear in a location near you.

Drag-racing motorcycle still zooming on NHDRO circuit

Longtime Tube & Pipe Journal readers might recall an article titled “Zero to sixty in the blink of an eye,” a story from 2003 about a few fabricators who teamed up to build a motorcycle for drag racing.

The principal designers, Bruce Van Sant and Rusty Kramer, had more than a few years of combined racing experience when they decided to build a bike from scratch, so they used the best ideas they had seen over the years to build a bike that is simple, sturdy, and easy to maintain.

Powered by a Suzuki GSX-R1100, which is fed a combination of high-octane gasoline and nitrous oxide, the machine develops about 475 horsepower (substantially more than the 225 horsepower it churned out before the nitrous system was added) and gets up to 60 miles per hour in about 1 second.

That bike isn’t new, but it’s still extremely fast, and a Van Sant still pilots it down the track. You can see countless bikes in various racing classes, and you might see the Van Sant motorcycle, on the NHDRO circuit this summer. See the schedule at http://nhdroracing.com/schedule.

Don’t forget your earplugs!