Structural steel fabrication in Orange County
Fabrication is everything that happens to a piece of steel before it arrives at your job. Mill stock comes in as plain beam, column, tube, plate, and angle. It leaves cut to length, with the holes drilled, the ends coped, the connection plates and stiffeners welded on, and a coat of primer over it. By the time it reaches the site it is a part, not a length of steel.
Doing it in the shop rather than in the air is the whole economy of it. A hole drilled on a bench takes a minute; the same hole thirty feet up on a lift takes twenty and needs a second person holding the drill. So the rule is simple: anything that can be done flat, in one place, with the member supported, gets done before it ships. What is left for the field is what genuinely has to happen in the field.
The drawings decide the tolerances, and they are tighter than people expect. Fabricated length on a member under 30 feet is held to plus or minus an eighth of an inch, and bolt holes have to line up with a bolt already in the connection at the other end. A quarter inch of accumulated error across a bay is a member that will not go in. So we work off the structural sheets and the shop drawings, mark and drill from one datum rather than measuring off the last hole, and check the finished piece against the drawing before it goes on the truck.
What that includes.
- Beams, columns, posts, and headers cut to length from the structural drawings
- Moment frames and braced frames fabricated as assemblies
- Connection plates, shear tabs, stiffeners, gussets, and base plates welded on
- Holes drilled and slotted, ends coped and beveled ready for field welds
- Embed plates, anchor bolt templates, and weld plates made to the embed drawing
- Shop primer, or prepped and sent out for galvanizing
- Delivered to site and set by the same people who built it
Questions we get on this one.
Can you fabricate if somebody else is erecting?
Yes. Send the structural sheets and the connection details and we will price the fabrication on its own. We will want to know who is setting it and how, because that changes what we leave loose and what we weld up in the shop.
Are you an AISC certified fabricator?
No, and if your specification requires one, say so at the invitation stage rather than after the award. AISC certification is a plant audit program aimed at larger shops. What we hold is the CSLB C-51 structural steel license, and the work is welded to AWS D1.1 and inspected by the project's special inspector.
Do you make shop drawings, or do I need a detailer?
For straightforward work we fabricate directly from the structural sheets. Anything with a lot of connections is worth a detailer, and on a permitted job the engineer usually wants shop drawings back for approval before steel gets cut. Tell us which situation you are in and we will say what it needs.
Galvanized or painted?
Depends where it lives. Interior steel that will be covered gets shop primer. Anything outdoors within a few miles of the water should be hot dip galvanized, which means the piece goes out to a plant and comes back on the plant's schedule. That is usually the longest item in the whole job, so decide it early rather than at the end.
Fabricate and erect, or just one?
Either. Doing both is usually cheaper and always simpler, because a fit problem in the shop is ours to fix rather than an argument on site about whose quarter inch it was.
This is licensed work. OC Mobile Welding LLC holds CSLB C-51 #1157116, C-51 Structural Steel, current and active. Working out of San Clemente, CA.