Tebbens Steel Installs First-Ever PeddiLaser

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In an industry steeped in tradition, the adoption of cutting-edge technology isn’t just progressive, it’s transformative. Tebbens Steel, a family-owned structural steel fabricator founded in 1944, has embraced that transformation with full force. Their investment in two Peddinghaus laser machines, one for tube and one for plate, marks a turning point not just for their own operations, but for the broader structural steel industry.

Tebbens Steel started in 1944. It was started by my grandfather, Alfred Tebbens, and from there, it grew and changed hands to my father in the early '60s. And then in the late '90s, I came aboard and we did more structural work.

Tebben Steels, what we're hoping to grow is by adding technology and using technology to help our team do a better job, be more efficient.

Our production is roughly a hundred tons per week here at Tebbens Steel, as much as six hundred tons per month, depending on how heavy work is at the time.

We do a lot of what we call tube bracing or, bracing in walls, and we have to cut through the tube and make sure that the plates line up. And that usually would take about two hours to get a brace done with through the shear plates. And this is down to twenty minutes. We've timed it.

On the tube laser, we've been running everything from I beams, rectangular tubing, c channel, angle iron. We've been covering it all.

We like to use the equipment as much as possible to do the scribing of the layout on all of our pieces. The fine lines that the laser puts on and the accuracy is phenomenal.

This machine enables us to do, up to eighteen inch round profiles, and we've been able to do a lot more custom features we've never been able to before.

The first project that we ran on the tube laser behind me was five by five vertical bracing made out of 5x5 HSS. We were able to process forty or fifty pieces of vertical bracing in less than two days on a new machine.

We had a job where we recently cut two and a quarter inch stainless steel. On the water jet that we have, it would have taken, I think it was seventeen hours. And on the plate laser, it took about an hour and a half. So the time saving was phenomenal, and no one could do it near us at the speed that we did it. And that's exactly what we purchased it for, to open up more opportunity, more doors for us to do.

My first impression of the plate laser was it is infinitely faster than our plate processor, which we thought was a pretty fast machine. I would say the benefits of using the shuttle table with a PeddiLaser is saving on average two to three hours a day where the machine is now constantly running rather than in an unloading state.

We had a plasma cutter, and that plasma cutter took an enormous amount of time to cut the material as well as the cleaning. We had two to three people all the time cleaning plate, and it was non-revenue producing.

The kerf difference between laser and plasma is almost uncomfortable because you're gonna see how tightly you can pack the parts in depending on what you're doing. I would say that the kerf on a laser is somewhere less than a thirty second whereas on our plasma machines that we're used to using, if you're cutting heavy plate, it could be as much as three sixteenths.

So both lasers have enabled our guys to produce more and be more efficient, and that is making their job easier. We're working smarter and not as hard as we work. So that's been a big help.

We as a company are, really finding synergies with, the human element and the machine and technology element and that's something that we're really trying to push forward to keep up with the pace of the production of our own.

So that's what I'm hoping for by having this new equipment, the technology behind it, and the team of Peddinghaus behind us because that is a big help in us being able to quote new projects, pursue different avenues, and pursue different lines of work that come our way.