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For a fabricator balancing high-volume bridge work alongside structural steel for buildings, the ability to control flow, timing and surface quality isn't optional, it's what determines whether projects move smoothly or pile up. When the second generation of the Osterloh family took ownership of Kard Welding in 2024, they weren't simply looking to increase output. They wanted a system that would let the shop run predictably, even as workloads grew more complex. That shift in thinking put blasting under the microscope.

Kard Welding got started in 1982. Our father was laid off from previous company, so he decided to get into welding.

He started it on his family farm in a small little chicken coop to go from a small little chicken coop to what it is today is pretty crazy if you think about it.

Got into some bending, some welding for another company here local, and then from there he was he was called, a guy had an idea, and they started a lot of structural steel processing for other fabricators that needed help with overflow.

Kard does fabrication of structural steel components of bridge components, bridge beams, bridge girders and miscellaneous metal. For structural steel market we work for other fabricators solely. We don't bid to contractors, so we work for various different customers and we do the processing of the steel. So we cut it, drill it, camber it, cope it, paint it.

We do anywhere from single truckload to multi truckloads.

Some of the bottlenecks that pushed us to getting the PeddiBlast is the amount of time that it was taking us to get projects through.

A lot of our stuff has to be SP-6 or SP-10 blasts, where before we weren't getting behind stiffeners in locations. This current blaster gets everything one time through so we don't have to run it double through.

We would get it to the other side of the building and turn around and have to bring it back so extra material handling to find out that we got to run it again.

We used to run 16 inches a minute on our old blaster, now we're running 8-10 feet a minute. So a ninety-foot-long web that we do for girders went from about a couple hours to run that one web, we are now down to nine minutes to run a ninety-foot piece.

Our PeddiBlast will see every piece of steel that runs through this shop. Efficiency wise, it's gonna be a tremendous value.

By installing the blaster, it's improved the business financially. We're able to meet deadlines better than what we were and just the blast profile is a hundred times better.

The fact that it's not as noisy as our machines before with the doors on it, it closes down. You don't have to hear all the noise. It's just cleaner. It keeps the dust in a little bit better. It blows off the shot.

You don't have to have somebody there to stop it. You don't risk going through a door like we have in the past. You don't risk the piece rolling off the rollers and falling on the floor because, you know, somebody wasn't paying attention. It stops it itself.

And you can tell it to start and as it's rolling it in and it knows when to actually stop it when the rollers come out the other side. So this machine can tell you how long the piece is when you put it on the rollers at the start of it to the end of it, and then it will also tell you how many minutes it took you to blast the piece.

Up until last year, we were running about sixty five hundred ton a year. This past year, we upped that to about up to thirteen thousand ton.

Then now that we have this piece, we're able to look at a lot more work for this size machine that we got.

I think the training for this machine went very smooth. The guy that did the training, he was very knowledgeable, knew exactly, you know, what the machine was supposed to do, when it was supposed to do it.

So we're to hire a new person, new operator, run it, maybe less than half a day and they should be able to run it by themselves with no issues at all.

Peddinghaus has been great, bringing the machinery to our attention and showing us what it could do and then with the process of being able to get the equipment here, get it installed, get it working. If we have a question or something, we can call them and troubleshoot what the problem might be. They have a quick turnaround with calling us back, letting us know, getting the parts to us. If we need a technician to come out, they'll send somebody out as well.

Some of the other pieces of equipment of Peddinghaus that we have currently right now, we do have an angle line, we do have a HSFDB-2500 plate processor, We have two Peddinghaus BDL-1250 drill lines. We also have a Peddinghaus coping machine and a PeddiWriter.

The company has grown in the last five years with adding men for one. Been making a lot of purchases with equipment just to keep up with automation to help with the efficiencies.

Next low for our company would be to you know invest in faster more accurate equipment and you know how can you make it more efficient with that.

This thing is gonna be a game changer. It's just that fast, that quick, that efficient. Why didn't we do this years ago?