Benefits of Onsite Welding in Managing Construction and Industrial Projects

22 February 2017

As the late afternoon sun drops low, signs of a welding operation can be spotted. A momentary flash is lighting up a small section of the construction site. This is the onsite welder, an expert structural steel worker who’s hell-bent on producing a first-rate part’s join. Based on a best-of-both-worlds approach, there are many advantages to this mobile welding method, beginning with the logistics factor.

A Logistics-Based Construction Asset

The structural beams and plates are machined and ready for further processing, but not a welder is available. There’s no time to leave this space-consuming bundle laying around. It needs to be dispatched. Onsite welders meet the metal building blocks at the location where they’re being installed, so there are no scheduling problems to worry about. Secondly, as implied, these are discrete building blocks, singular structural parts. The onsite mobile welder enables a grounds-up assembling technique here. He basically builds something from nothing. That is, of course, as long as a powerful crane is also available.

Part of the Team

There’s an element of uncertainty involved when the welder is a freelancer, a subcontractor who has his own business concerns to run. That’s why an enterprising structural steel company considers a company-employed onsite welder an important resource. In effect, the cranes and builders place the building segments, but the accompanying company welder is the glue that anchors these pieces, one to the next. There’s a cost-effective offshoot that branches off of this method, for every construction resource is encapsulated right there, right within the company team and its accompanying equipment load.

Standardised Assembly Methods

A localised workflow suits the structural steel business very well. The supports and plates, fabricated joints and reinforcing flanges, are machined in-shop. They’re bent, guillotined, and otherwise processed on that controlled floor. Then, when the parts are finally process-ready, they’re transported to the construction site. The next logical part of that sequence is to erect the structure, which is fine until it all falls apart. What’s missing here is the onsite welder, the technician that works in concert with the crane to weld the erected sections or entire faces of the final structure.

Structural steel is endlessly malleable when it’s in the machine shop. It cuts and bends, forms intricate geometrical profiles or simply acts as a staunch supporting plate. Many of these parts can, of course, be welded into transportable component assemblages, bu only an onsite welder possesses the capabilities to cost-effectively transform these discrete elements into one large, all-encompassing structure.