Robotic Welding Meets Steel Plate Processing at Alpha Iron

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Located in the cozy town of Ridgefield, Washington, Alpha Iron is making waves all across the west coast. Expressing a need for the best equipment to produce speed and quality in production, Alpha purchased their first Peddinghaus machine, the PeddiRotator beam turning device. Shortly after, the shop came together with a Zeman SBA Compact+ robotic welder and HSFDB-B plate processor.

Well, we started Alliance Industrial Group as a steel erection company in 2001.

As our company grew, we needed to fill a gap in our mid-sized fabrication market, and so we started Alpha Iron to simply just supply embeds, canopies, stair systems, misc. metals systems to supplement the structures that we were buying from some of the other major fabricators.

The recession hit in 2008 and, as a result of that recession, we had to be more competitive in every aspect of our life. And we wanted to get the best equipment and the best people to produce speed and quality.

The CNC equipment allowed our tonnage to grow tremendously.

We're really excited to be able to do countersinking, tapping, a whole sorts of different processes with this new machine. it can do milling, end milling. We definitely are excited to get into that.

I mean, it's going to open up a whole new industry for us that we're going to be able to get into the machining part as well as the metal manufacturing.

As we've gotten this thing fired up, we're learning more and more about what it can do and how much more effective it is than a standard plasma table that we've got. And, so, we're really utilizing it more and more.

Really, in this business, that's what it comes down to a lot of times, is how to get the leg up, and get a project done quicker, and get the building operating. And, so, our CNC equipment's great for that sort of function.

So, we realized that we needed to invest some money in our plate processing in order to deliver a quality product on time.

So, with the new plate table, it's been a fun task to try and figure out how we're going to make that and optimize our shop.

It's nice to see that it drills holes faster than we can plasma the holes on the old plate table. And it's a nicer cleaner quality, so I think that we'll be able to definitely sell that to our customers.

Our customers know that, when they sign up with Alpha Iron, that they're going to get the best quality project at a fair price.

And that's really where the return on investment is at Alpha Iron.

The Zeman, again, in our quest for speed and quality, has been a good addition to our shop, because it is a very accurate machine when it fits up.

And it allows me to be confident that our fabrications are going to be assembled correctly, and it changes the way that people think on the shop floor as well. So, you could take up less actual shop fabrication floor space and maximize the amount of processing you can do.

We can run that thing during the middle of the night and get welds done when the guys go home, and we can have that thing running 24/7.

Peddinghaus equipment has really played some critical roles, allowed us to do projects that we would not have bid on four years ago.

For the first time every single project is ahead of schedule.