Cutting Smarter Not Harder at Kerr Squared

Search Video Gallery

Channel: Customers

See how the team at Kerr² went from plasma to precision with the power of the PeddiLaser. What used to take hours now takes mere minutes! Faster cuts, cleaner edges, and nonstop productivity. This is what laser-focused fabrication looks like.

Kerr Squared was started in 2015. My wife and I started in a two-car garage. We're doing a bunch of gates, little small projects, rail here and there. Just at about that time, my brother, he wound up coming and helping me and all of a sudden we kind of got busy.

And then we got one random call from a purchaser at Facebook, spoke with them. They all loved us, and, we got a whole bunch of work from them. And now here we are doing structural work and miscellaneous work. So, do a little bit of everything.

So, we're a layout shop, so pretty much if it pays money, we'll do it. Mainly, we try and stay in the structural steel and miscellaneous industries. That that's kind of our bread and butter.

We probably average 25-ish projects a year. So 10 years, 250 projects plus or minus. What made me start looking at Peddinghaus though is at Fabtech, what I noticed is that they were just overbuilt machines. If you're going to hit a Peddinghaus machine with a forklift, I'm worried about the forklift damage, not the machine damage. That's what pushed me towards Peddinghaus was just the quality of the machine itself.

Obviously the addition of the laser has changed our dynamic quite a bit just because we're doing a lot more overflow work, which is really good for us because again, talking about fast money with structural steel. With the laser, it's easy in, easy out. You know, we're loading plates on there, pulling them off, palletizing it, and shipping it away.

You know, it used to be it would take us to cut a plate of like an eight by ten quarter inch, like an hour or so. Now we could do it in like ten minutes. So pretty big difference.

The cuts that come off of the PeddiLaser are amazing. I've never seen anything like it, honestly. Not gonna lie. The plasma that we're using beforehand, the kerf angle, even on like small quarter-inch material, you can see it.

And this, even on the two-inch material that we cut, there's not really that much kerf.

We've cut on the PeddiLaser, we've cut up to three-inch mild steel. I think we've done some two-inch stainless and I think an inch and a half aluminum is is the highest that we've done thus far.

Micro-tabbing is very useful because whenever the machine is running, because it's pushing air through the nozzle, sometimes your pieces tend to flip. And whenever you micro-tab them, it prevents that.

With the PeddiLaser, we're able to actually cut roof access ladders and making thin skinny strips with the holes in them. Because of the micro-tabbing, we're not getting any warpage or walkage from the material. I think we did ten ladders in one day, would normally have taken us three or four days with just having the two guys on it.

That's one one very small aspect of just like holy crap, this is so much faster doing it this way. You don't need another secondary machine to do this.

One of the nicest things about the PeddiLaser is being able to etch parts versus having to lay it out by hand with chalk and, you know, waste more time.

Also, common line is one of my favorites because it saves a bunch of material because you could just go off the line of the last piece of material.

PeddiLaser's given us more capacity to run more jobs and more product in any given shift.

The steel industry currently, there's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of work that's being asked to be priced and bid. I think that in the very, very near future, a lot of the stuff that we've been looking at and waiting for is actually going to change. When that happens, if you don't have a PeddiLaser, you're gonna be left in the back of the pack.