Cooper Steel Hits a Home Run in Nashville

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From skyscrapers to ballparks to massive guitar-shaped scoreboards, Cooper Steel does it all. Now thanks to Peddinghaus CNC technology, they can do it all just in the nick of time. For decades, Nashville has been a wildly popular tourist attraction. First Tennessee Park, the stadium built for the Nashville Sounds in 2015, was a significant contribution to Nashville's appeal. See how Cooper Steel completed this icon of the Nashville skyline with the help of the Peddinghaus BDL-1250/9B drill line, and increased their production by 100%.

We're really proud of the Nashville Sounds Ballpark in downtown Nashville.

It was our first ballpark. And it turned out to be a very, very beautiful stadium and a great place and, really, an icon for the Nashville Skyline.

And we really had fun building the guitar-shaped scoreboard.

So we got the task to draw, fabricate, and erect very, very quickly.

And so the Peddinghaus machines, of course, really helped us get the scoreboard steel up in time for opening night.

Cooper Steel was founded in 1960 by Kenneth and Faye Cooper. They started the company.

And he ran all the operations, the shop and the fields. And she was the purchasing agent, human resources, payroll clerk. And that's how it started.

The beam line from Peddinghaus has really been of great benefit on accuracy on holes, for quick connections, speed of running them through the saw.

Then we cut them. And so we chose to go with two saws in tandem with our machine.

And in doing this, when you've run your first piece through the drill line and it is finished running through the drill line it's doing the finished cut on, we're able to bring our next piece up and do a trim cut on the front end of that beam.

And so both saws are running at the same time.

And with it doing that, when that piece that is in the drill line is finished and runs through, you don't have to bring another piece up to that one saw and wait for it to do the trim cutting.

It's already ready, so it's ready to run through the drill line.

It's increased production on the beam lines by about 100% on some jobs, depending on the thickness of the beams.

Besides the increasing production and efficiency there, the accuracy of the finished product has just gone up unbelievably.

We used to have quite a few fab errors just from guys drilling holes in the wrong spot, mag drills moving around. Well, we've gotten away from that.

Build crews are commenting always now about how great it is to do a job that our machines put out where they don't to use a bull pin on a single hole on the entire job.

Accuracy is a very important part. And I think that's one thing, that Peddinghaus--the equipment, you're able to count on it.

Now that we're importing data from our detailing softwares right into the machines, the number of errors has gone even further down. It's almost minuscule.

You can't even track fab errors anymore because they're so few and far between. So it gives our customer a much better product.

For the most part, we still have the same footprint that we had 25 years ago. But the amount of steel that we produce has quadrupled in that time.

That's one of the things we pride ourselves on a company, is being able to get there faster than anybody else.

And that takes a coordinated team of designers, detailers, of course, our shop, and then our erection crews.

So we like to feel like we can beat anybody else's schedule with our team.