Custom Fabrication

Custom fabrication is steel work that starts without a catalog number. A bracket, a guard, a stand, a frame, or a part for a machine nobody makes parts for any more. We build from whatever you can bring: a drawing, a photo, a rough sketch with dimensions, or the broken original.

A broken sample is often the best place to start, because it shows the size, the hole pattern and exactly where it failed. The failure point deserves attention before anything gets copied. A part that cracked in one place will tend to crack there again if it is remade the same way, so the remake is the chance to add material or change the shape at that point.

The first real decision is the steel. Most brackets, frames and stands are carbon structural steel, and ASTM A36 is the common specification for it. Its scope covers carbon structural steel shapes, plates and bars of structural quality for riveted, bolted or welded construction of bridges and buildings, and for general structural purposes.

Parts that take abrasion are a different case. Anything scraped by rock, gravel or scrap usually wants abrasion resistant plate, the same class of steel our dump bodies use, and those grades are sold by hardness. SSAB publishes its Hardox 400 at 370 to 430 Brinell, and its Hardox 500 plate up to 32 mm at 470 to 530 Brinell. Harder plate holds up to wear longer, and it asks more of the fabricator when it is cut and welded.

Where the grade matters, it should be traceable. SSAB notes that the alloying elements of its plate are stated on the mill certificate, and that those elements govern the preheating and interpass temperatures needed to weld it. Two plates can look identical on the rack and need quite different handling under the torch, and the certificate is how you know which one you have.

Structural welding has a code of its own. AWS D1.1, the American Welding Society's structural welding code for steel, establishes the essential requirements for welding structural steel, covering design, fabrication, qualification and inspection. If a customer or an engineer requires D1.1 for a part, that requirement belongs on the drawing from the start, because the code reaches beyond the weld itself.

A lot of custom work here is for trucks and yards: brackets and mounts for body equipment, guards, racks, and replacement parts that are no longer made. Anything that bolts to a chassis follows the chassis maker's rules, set out on our dump body installation page, and parts cut from hardened plate follow the steel mill's cutting guidance on our metal cutting page.

Bring the drawing, the photo or the part, with the dimensions that matter and a note of what the part has to hold or resist. Custom work is done at both shops.