Drilling Rig Walking System

Design typically means fashion, colors, and other glamorous aspects. In the world of fabrication? Not so much. Your usual designer and artist can paint beautiful images and design fancy dresses to wear at red carpet events. That’s one way to go. Designers or “artists” if you will, in the fabrication industry focus more on what it should be rather than dreaming about its possibilities. Designing in the fabrication industry means drawing blue prints of the most complicated machinery and tools. Additionally, they must account for what materials must be used, how much of it, and where. Of course its not always for a complicated project, but lets face it. In this day in age, if the project was that simple, you wouldn’t be calling in a professional to create the architecture of the product.

This is what you might think of when you hear the word artist in the normal world:

This is what an designer or “artist” does in our world of fabrication:

Design isn’t always flashy or beautiful, but in the world of fabrication, design carries its own meaning and unique beauty.

When you hear about sawing, not much comes to mind except, well, a saw. It’s a fairly basic process that’s used often enough to where everyone knows of it, but not enough to where everyone really knows much about it. One would think that sawing’s just sawing. That’s what it is and that’s just how it’s gonna be. Contrary to popular belief, sawing’s not just a handle attached to a sharped jagged blade. Yes it’s quite true, sawing can be sophisticated and be used for more than cutting wood and killing off people in horror movies. All jokes aside, sawing really has evolved over the years since its inception. Nowadays, there are mechanical saws such as the radial arm and electric miter saw that can do much more than just cut wood. Cutting through pure rock and steel is entirely possible now. Of course if you’re in the industry, this isn’t news, but for many people outside of the industry, it may come as a shock when you tell them that giant mechanical piece of a machine is a saw. Yes that is a saw and it is cutting through many inches of steel.

Plate cutting’s pretty much in the same boat when it comes to general public knowledge. Heck some people might even think its where you cut dishes. Although with plate cutting tools, that is most definitely possible, it is also most definitely not what the process is about. Plates of metal must be cut and shaped a certain way for specific projects. The best part about it is that you don’t even really have to do it yourself anymore! With the aid of computers, CNC Plate Cutting aka Computer Numerical Control Plate Cutting is where the computer and the software utilized with it does all the work for you. Well not all of it. Employees still have to be trained in using the software, the computer, and still be educated on how plate cutting works. Even if a doctor can just press a button to complete a surgery, you’d sure feel a whole lot better if he we knew what he was doing anyways. Even if a computer was there to make it much easier.

Ever walk by an abstract building or structure and wonder how it got like that? The answer to that question can be answered in one word: Machining. Sometimes, the average looking piece of metal just won’t do. For whatever reason, it needs to look a certain way that’s so unique it’ll turn heads. Machining may seem like just cutting metal into certain shapes to fit a certain part or role, but there’s more to it than that. Aesthetics in machinery can go a long way. For example, if you needed a car, the most important thing is that it can get you from point A to point B. Naturally, if there are cars that look nice and get the job done, you’d take that one without a doubt. That is, if the nice car is within your budget. The same goes for machined metal. Most of the time with fabricated and machined materials, the most important thing is that it does what it needs to do. However, when it comes to tools and materials within industries that involve some serious work like drilling, you don’t want just any tool. You want the best looking tool the industry has to offer. You may ask: “What about the quality and the functionality of the tool? Isn’t that more important?” Yes, quality and functionality of a tool or any product is important, but when it comes down to it, quality and functionality should be by default, already good. The aesthetic aspect of a tool or any other machined product isn’t just icing on the cake. If the machine shop can make it work and look good, it tells you something about the people who made it. It tells you that they have better resources and very capable employees. In most cases you should assume the best, but anticipate the worst. If a company machines something for you and its the best thing you’ve ever seen, take it for what it is. Because chances are, no one in the machining industry wants a bad reputation. A good looking product under these circumstances doesn’t mean its too good to be true, but rather a statement saying: “Anything they can do, we can do better.”

Walk into a junk or metal scrap yard and all you see around you is a mass of seemingly useless objects. In reality, when correctly combined, those materials have the potential to be almost anything. That’s what welding’s all about: taking the useless or broken and turning it into something new. Bringing what was torn apart back together. As emotional and sentimental as it sounds, its not exactly pleasant work. When you have to hold a welding tool that can burn up to heat levels of 3,500 Celsius. That’s a lot of heat. A lot. It takes only 100 Celsius degrees of heat to boil water and that’s already hot enough for anyone. Take that heat output and multiply it by 35. Maybe in the state of Texas the welding torch isn’t as hot for some people, but wherever it is, it’s always capable of cutting through inches of steel which reason enough for anyone to stay far away from it as possible. Dangerous as it might be, it’s still a fairly simple process. If it were to get anymore complicated however, expect to see a rise in accidents in fabrication and machine shops. Still, welding is essential and won’t be going anywhere for a long time. Welding’s one of those thing’s where the process couldn’t be any simpler, but the consequences of messing up couldn’t be any more dangerous. Appreciate all those welders out their making our industries stable because they definitely deserve it!