It has been a natural progression for us as we’ve worked to meet our customer’s requirements over the years. Because of our skilled in house sheet metal profiling capabilities we’re a shoe-in for the basic processes. But when our clients realize that we can also complete additional sheet metal fabrication operations they’re often pleasantly surprised. After all, it can save quite a bit of money to keep laser cutting, fabrication, finishing and assembly in one place.

We’ve also invested in the software and education necessary to be an expert design and engineering partner to our clients. Through our certified expertise in advanced engineering software such as SolidWorks we have helped many of our clients re-engineer their products and save money in production costs, create stronger products, and speed up time to market.

We have a lot to offer. It has simply been a natural progression for us to bring more and more capability into our facility. We hope you’ll consider taking advantage of this capability for your next project!

Sometimes an off the shelf product just won’t suffice!

A customer approached us with a need for a custom built sheet metal enclosure for ships. It is an electrical enclosure so it needed to be water tight and conform to other best practices when designing for this purpose.

Often, in this customer’s industry, companies will buy stock Hoffman enclosures and then modify them to suit their needs. In this case – and we suppose in many other cases – it wasn’t practical to do that.

We designed and engineered the box to the customer’s specification and fabricated the enclosure in house while meeting the specified time frame. The pictures in this post are pre-final finish but you can get a great idea of what the final product is going to look like.

The net result for our customer is a product that is a signature representation of their work instead of a modification of someone else’s product.

The product is a folding ramp that is used for heavy duty equipment that needs to be loaded. It’s very useful for heavier equipment because of its ability to affect a more gradual ramp slope.

The Challenge

When fully extended, the ramp was not strong enough to manage the heaviest loads. Adding more materials made the ramp assembly unnecessarily heavy and increased the overall cost of manufacturing.

So how do you increase the overall strength of a product like this while not adding to overall weight or cost to manufacture?

The Solution

We set to work strengthening the ramp system conceptually using our Solid Works modelling system. We found that if we added stratigically placed embosses and weldments then the ramp would have enough rigidity to support the specified loads.

We were also able to engineer in material savings by using this methodology. We estimate it cut down material usage by 10% overall. That’s quite a savings over a long run of this product!

We produced the newly engineered prototype in house using our Laser Cutting, high precision forming equipment, and a welding and finishing cell. The client was thrilled with the changes made to the product and is looking forward to producing the ramp for the market place.

Do you have a fabrication challenge that needs a fresh pair of eyes? Not only do we fabricate prototypes and production runs of sheet metal products we also design and engineer using the best tools available today. Give us a call! 800-235-2595

Nesting software allows us to take any configuration or combination of parts that begin as flat cut or stamped material which lay out in such a way as to maximize the yield we can obtain from a sheet of flat material. We combine this nesting method with precise job scheduling so we can aggregate jobs from different clients that share similar materials. This allows us to maximize material yield for our customers. This is especially important as material prices continue to increase.

By putting some thought in how we process flat cut parts and by expanding and refining our scheduling capabilities we’ve been able to further realize our customer’s goals.

We invite you to have us evaluate your product or part against our process please contact us. We’d be happy to provide you with a cost saving nesting solution!

We’ll be highlighting interesting work we’re doing for our clients and sharing innovations we develop in house. We’ll also be digging up some of the most interesting fabrication news we can find. Hopefully our new site will be a valuable resource to you.

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