S&S Welding's Automation Era

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With over two decades of experience in structural steel, S&S Welding knows the time to embrace automation is now or never. In the last 6 months, S&S commissioned a new PeddiAssembler robotic welding system, an SPS plate sorting system and a PeddiBlast shot blasting system. With newfound efficiency, the company is not only empowered to tackle larger projects with ease, but also mitigate challenges posed by a shortage of skilled labor, ensuring consistent and reliable production output.

Since I've owned it, in 21 years, we've done over 1,000 projects, anywhere from $10,000 up to $5 million. And we have more capacity to do bigger jobs, bigger than $5 million.

We're about 100,000-110,000 square feet. We purchased new equipment, new technology, robots.

The PeddiAssembler, the PeddiBlaster. PeddiBlaster is safe. I can lay down the beams and keep them in one position throughout the whole process. We can blast twice as much at the same time. So it picks up production.

It helps us with consumables. The clean steel really does not chew up the consumables like it would. Secondly, it helps the welders immensely. And right now, with that PeddiBlast, we're probably putting in number six commercial blast on everything. So the primer adhesion is really tremendous with it. So it just gives us a final - a better final product when it goes out the door.

The installation of the PeddiAssembler went well. We had training a couple of days, and we were up and running. No issues.

Probably 75% of all the material we have in the shop will run through the PeddiAssembler. Any columns that have to have base plates, cab plates, connection plates fitted to them will go there. And any of the beams that have, you know, stiffeners or anything else will go through and be fitted.

It's absolutely a PeddiAssembler is way beyond what I thought it was going to do. It's helped us tremendously in the fitting of the parts.

Probably the biggest bottleneck we had was hiring fitters. It seems to be a real issue in the industry. Some columns we have, it has taken a fitter 6-8 hours to fit it. Now with the PeddiAssembler, we're probably fitting that in maybe 30 or 45 minutes. So it's really increased the production by at least 70% and it's taking place at three fitters actually. So that's probably been our biggest production gain with the equipment from Peddinghaus.

The SPS solved the problem of hunting for parts that took hours or several minutes to find. The high-dollar fitters and employees that I have look for parts is very unproductive and very costly.

So in the past, all the material coming off the burn table we'd stacked on pallets and then put out in the yard.

And, you know, we'd have so many pallets lined up out there that it was difficult to find exactly what you wanted. And that's why I put in the plate sorter, and it's really been a good compliment to the PeddiAssembler. With the plate sorter, you know, being able to read the size of that plate and put it in a proper bin so you know where it is. The PeddiAssembler operator knows exactly what to put on the conveyor. It just streamlined the whole process immensely.

One morning when I come to work and found I had four fitters missing, missing that day, and I had a lot of work to do. So I picked up the phone and called up Peddinghaus and ordered the PeddiAssembler. We're going to continue to grow and see where the industry takes us. I'm not sure what that route is yet, but we'll continue to grow as much as we can and as cautiously as we can.