Still in college however I’ve taken up a job in a welding place however I do no welding, I simply get the metal ready for the welders to weld it. Cut this piece, stack those pieces, bend this, put that on a pallet and put it over there, etc. Check out this 100’ beam that came in on Friday, got the picture today. Bad picture but I was leaving when I took it.
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I found more pictures but before that a little back story since I feel like telling a story. The company I work at is a decent size, it’s not small as we’ve been around for 50+ years and our size shoes it but we’re certainly dwarfed by the giants of the steel industry. We have a couple of sections of the shop which I’ll give a brief run down.
1. The welding floor is where all of the welding is done.
2. The rail shop is where they take pipes and bend them to the specifications required for them to be welded to 1/2” square bars to make hand rails.
3. The beam and pipe area is where beams and pipes (most of the time they’re 60’) come through and get cut down to size. The sizes of them vary, some beams are like 8” wide, 4” high “legs”, and 1/4” thick, while other beams may be 36” wide, 12” high legs” and 2” thick. Before I came we’ve had a beam come through that was so wide you could stand in it. Also they occasionally deal with channels
4. The cut shop, where I work
, we deal with plate, flat bar, angles, gauge, and rebar. The plate is almost always 20’ long and most of the time 8’ wide. We occasionally get in 5’/6’ wide and also once in a blue moon they come in 30’ wide, it all depends on what the buzzard (owner) found for sale. Before I came here a 55’ long sheet has come through according to my boss. The thickness of the sheets depends, we get everything from 5/16” to 3” however the most common thickness to come in is between 1/4”-1.25”. The ends of the scale are rare. And anything thicker than 1 1/4 has to be burned with the torch head instead of the plasma head on the plasma table so what could take 2 hours on 1 1/4” could take 2 days to do on 1.5”+.
Flat bar comes in various sizes, either 20’ or 40’ long, anywhere from 0.5” wide to I’ve seen 10” wide. Thickness goes from something like 3/16 to 1’ however 1/4-1/2 is most common.
Angles, also either 20’ or 40’ long however I heard of a 70’ angle before I came. Thickness is generally around 1/4 to 3/4. The legs can be anywhere from 1” x 1” to like 8” x 8” and the legs aren’t always the same size, you can very well see something like a 8” x 6” angle. I’ve seen that a lot of what we use angle wise is 1/4” x 4” x 4”.
Rebar, we use #4,#5, and #6, we use to bring in 20’ sticks of it and I would hand cut it then hand bend it on a machine but we got a rebar machine that does it all so now we just bring in whole spoils of it that are like 1,000’ at least if I had to guess.
5. My least favorite, the paint shop... 99% of what comes through the shop will go to the paint shop before getting shipped out. Most of what goes there has been welded as like 95% of the metal that gets shipped out is welded but occasionally you get some flat bar, angles, or something else that doesn’t get welded and only painted. I hate the paint shop and refuse to spend anymore of my time writing about it.
I was going to post pictures along with this post but the connection is crap so I’ll post them tomorrow.
