Steel Fabrication for the Oil & Gas Industry with New Industries

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In order to remain competitive in the evolving structural steel industry, fabricators understand the need for CNC technology. This "My Peddinghaus Story" highlights New Industries in Morgan City, Louisiana, USA, where Bill New and his team are experiencing remarkable results from the first installed HSFDB-C plate processor. Find out how the bevel cut technology and hard stamp part marking system is providing New Industries with increased labor savings and production efficiency.

We're located on the intercoastal waterway in Morgan City, Louisiana, which is kind of the heart of the oil and gas business in South Louisiana.

Our primary customers are oil and gas related, primarily offshore, that deals with particularly in deep water and pipelines and flow lines, manifolds, things that are related to the oil and gas production, sub-sea production.

We also build large, pretty large pressure vessels. We look for the bigger and more complex projects that have to go by water mostly because of their physical size or weight.

But we don't do thin plate. We do thick plate. So we looked at different products we could do, and automation was a process in that.

Part of that was driven by labor availability. Part of it is driven by the fact of efficiency. You automate when times are good to get your production capacity up.

And then in slow times, automation, because your labor input is so much less, makes you much more competitive than the guy down the street.

You know, you're limited with what you can punch. You know with a small hole--We can't punch small holes in big plate, thick plate.

Whereas in the drill machine, I can drill those holes, and I can tap, and I can do all those other things.

In our type of work, you know we don't do bolted connections very much. And so it's mostly welded. And so it's heavy plate. And there's a lot of times for the weld prep, plate has to be beveled.

Being able to bevel on the machine saves a lot of time. Plus it made the bevels, they're typically more accurate, particularly if you're beveling by hand. You know, it's just not going to be as good a part. The angle might be slightly off.

Whereas if I'm at the programming level, I could check the part before I ever cut it. I cut the first one. I double check. And then after that, they're all the same.

You know, if I got a guy out there doing it by hand, you know, he's going to cut 10 part--he's going to bevel 10 parts. They're not all going to be--in fact, probably no two of them are going to be exactly alike. Whereas if I run them on the machine, all 10 of them are going to be exactly alike.

And so the ability to bevel on the machine is a huge labor savings for us.

And a lot of what we do is kind of quick turnaround work. And so if we can speed that process up, every man hour I can take out of labor, I can put that guy doing something else.

The stamp is a big thing for us because most of our projects we do, particularly in sub-sea, we have to have 100% material traceability.

And that stamp, always before, you know, somebody would write the heat code, the trace number on that part. Well, it's easy for somebody to make a mistake.

Whereas when we're stamping it, we program that in at the program level so that when it makes that part, it stamps that number in there, that trace code, whatever we're using.

So a very good machine--we've had very good success with Peddinghaus machines.

We've had good service. I mean, the technicians are--We've had some very good technicians who knew the equipment.

You know, a lot of times, we need things troubleshot over the phone. If we're having issues, we can do that over the phone. And like I said, for us, you know, the machine's not making money if it's not making parts.

Pretty much my philosophy is if it's small enough to fit on a truck, I probably don't want to build it because there's lots of guys can do that.

So we look for the bigger, more complex projects.