| The first step in our process was to define the scope of the changes. We do a mix of stick built, field assembled curtain wall systems and shop assembled unitized curtain wall systems. Our first task was to decide what our focus would be. We have two shops in Fremont. Shop A is located directly on the property of our main office. We do most of our field assembled fabrication here. We have also fabricated most of our stock length material for our unitized curtainwall systems in this building. Shop B is located just down the street (actually adjacent to our precast facility) from shop A. This facility has more open space and also quite a bit more yard space. We have been doing our unitized assembly in this building.After much discussion, we decided to focus on our unitized curtain wall fabrication. We are doing more and more unitized work lately. This is due to the fact that our company is growing rapidly, both in terms of size and geography. We are doing more urban high-rise construction today than we ever did in the past. This type of work is more condusive to unitized construction.
We split the task into three groups. One group would work on how we would receive and stage our stock length material and glass from our vendors. The second group would focus on the equipment and fabrication of the stock lengths. The third group would look at the assembly glaze process. The goal is to be able to fabricate, assemble and glaze two projects concurrently in shop B. We need to complete approx. 30 units per day per project. My group is working on the fabrication portion of the project. We began by doing some research on the different major equipment manufacturers for our industry. The goal was to contact these companies and get a representative to come out and discuss their products with us. This way they could see first hand what we are doing and make suggestions on the type of equipment they could supply. Our feeling is that we needed some type of machining center. This is a multi-axis CNC machine that can fabricate the long lengths (approx. 24′-0″ to 30′-0″) aluminum extrusions. After much research, the companies we fould were:
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Archives for March 2007
March 2, 2007
