Project Execution

Industrial Fabrication & Equipment Modifications

Field conditions often require parts or structures that do not come out of a catalog. Steel Square fabricates brackets, platforms, guarding, enclosures and other equipment-related modifications, including weld repair and field changes tied to the project.

Discuss a Project

The trigger

Fabrication & Modification Scope

Field conditions need a part no catalog carries
Brackets, platforms or guarding must be built to fit
Existing structures need weld repair or changes
A modification is tied to an install or repair

Making the Part That Does Not Exist

Fabrication is what happens when nothing in a catalogue fits. It covers the transfer between two machines that were never designed to meet, the frame or support that holds something where it has to sit, guarding shaped to a specific footprint, platforms and handrails that give a technician somewhere to stand, and modifications to equipment already in service.

Most of it is small. Almost none of it is optional.

What Gets Fabricated

Safety and protection is the largest category: barriers, fencing, handrails, guarding and machine enclosures, plus bollards protecting racking, panels and equipment from forklift traffic.

Access is the second: platforms, mezzanine decks and steel erection, so maintenance can reach the parts of a system that need reaching.

Then the equipment work itself. Transfers, frames and supports, custom machinery, and modifications to installed assets when the requirement has changed but the machine has not.

Off-the-Shelf Guarding Is Built for a Machine, Not a Building

A guard package is designed around the machine in isolation, on the assumption that it sits alone on a clear floor.

It stops fitting the moment a conveyor crosses an aisle, a panel sits where a truck turns, two machines are closer together than the standard package expects, or a maintenance point needs daily access three metres up. At that point the guarding gets fabricated to suit, or it gets modified on site by somebody without the tools, or it gets removed. Only one of those three is a solution.

The Cost of the Workaround

The argument for fabricating a part is usually made against doing nothing, and doing nothing is rarely free.

The alternative to a proper transfer is an operator moving product by hand. The alternative to an access platform is a ladder and a slower job every time. Those costs are a few minutes a shift, they never appear in a downtime report because the line never actually stopped, and over a year they are larger than the part would have been.

Field Repair & Modification

Steel Square can perform weld repair and modify existing equipment-related structures when a system needs to be repaired or changed in place, which is often the only option on equipment that cannot be moved or taken out of service.

Project Experience

At Walgreens Anderson, Steel Square scope includes fencing and bollards. A separate Walgreens Windsor corrective repair included field-built access platforms and weld repair.