Steel Fab Tour in Charlotte!

This year’s gathering in Charlotte, NC for the NISD Annual meeting began with the fabrication shop tour of Steel Fab, Inc., about 18 miles from our hotel. We met at 1:30 p.m. at the Lobby of the Embassy Suites in Uptown Charlotte and loaded into the chartered bus for the trip to the shop.

At least, most of us did. Mr. Jim Truitt was on a call and did get left behind. He had to take an Uber. We did wait for him to arrive before we entered the building prior to starting our tour!

Established in 1955, Steel Fab, Inc. has grown to include 14 fabrication facilities and 15 offices, with the corporate office based in Charlotte. Steel Fab, Inc., is an AISC Certified Steel Fabricator. The fabrication shop is about 400,000 square feet with 260 employees, processing about 12,000 labor hours and shipping 80 truckloads of fabricated steel per week. If you do the math on that, they are potentially producing 3.2 million pounds of steel PER WEEK at the Charlotte location alone! That’s a lot of steel.

Castellated beams – pictured right and below, are a ‘bread and butter’ item in Steel Fab’s shop. The manufacuring process here involves cutting the beam web in the pattern shown in the bottom picture, then welding the beam ‘center’ pictured right. This way, designers get both the beam stregth and depth needed to use as a steel joist substitute.