Blog posts tagged with 'curved steel'

The Madison Center is a 530 foot tall, 36 story high rise office building in Seattle, Washington and is featured in the June edition of Modern Steel. Albina Co., Inc. was the bender/roller on this project and worked specifically on what is being called "The Great Room" which is a 45-foot tall steel framed entryway rotunda. Albina bent many material types for this project including tube steel 8" x 6" up to 12" x 12", 3" x 3" angle, W10 and W16 wide flange, 8" pipe and more. Check out the article for some more details on the architectural feat and some great pictures. We will be heading up to Seattle soon to get some pictures of our own to share. Stay tuned!

Check out the cover spot and three page feature article on Albina Co., Inc. in the June Rocky Mountain Edition of A2Z Manufacturing Magazine. Pages 18-20! We had such a great time working with Linda and Kim to highlight and showcase all of the amazing curved steel projects we have done in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Some projects featured in the article include:

We recently completed a great project where our bends will be used for various parts on high-end farming equipment. The bending project consisted of three different material types including:

Tube Steel 5" X 5" X .250" WALL A500 GR B- Albina cut and bent material to net 108 pcs.

Tube Steel 5" X 2" X .250" WALL A500 GR B- Albina cut and bent material to net 100 pcs.

Tube Steel 2" X 2" X .250" WALL A500 GR B- Albina cut and bent material to net 403 pcs.

We recently finished up some  Tube Steel ¾" X ¾" X .065" WALL 6063-T52 ALUM bent into a double 90° configuration to a 3¼" inside radius. These curved steel parts will be used for seat frames on small airplanes. We do a number of parts for the aviation and aerospace industries including hydraulic lines, exhaust lines, exterior structural parts and interior support elements like the seat frames pictured below.

After many years of consideration, we determined it was the right time to move our shop workers into personal digital devices and start "working smarter." The initial desire was to have workers get rid of the old, antiquated paper time card system and move to a better digital solution. What evolved was a very powerful personal digital device that shares a wealth of information internally and externally. Some highlights include:

1. Picture Vault. Operators have the ability to take pictures of a customer's project during various phases of production and easily upload those pictures for sharing with the customer via our website. 
2. Time cards. We no longer fill out paper time cards or punch a clock. Workers are able to apply time automatically to orders and machines with a simple click of the button. All of the time is automatically tied into our job costing and payroll system avoiding double entry and extra handling of paper time cards.
3. Daily and Weekly Schedules are now available for all workers on their personal device, instead of being on a central computer that all workers had to walk to.
4. MTR's are now available for workers to review for all jobs that require heat numbers to be verified and transferred.
5. Internet allows workers to access our Bending Calculators page and use our powerful bending calculators to help with daily math.
6. Email is available to certain workers that have Albina email accounts to allow for documented communication between workers.
7. Scientific calculators are available to all workers.
8. Access to Albina's vast library of tooling.
9. Access to saved production notes for repeat parts.
10. Access to setup pictures that can be zoomed to get a detailed view of what is required.
11. Ability to preview a work order without tracking down printed paperwork.
12. Access to a company wide vacation schedule so workers know when vacation time is coming up and when vacation time is available.
13. Ability to preview a purchase order and receive a purchase order.
14. Ability to update job status and mark when parts are complete in real time.
15. Performance Review. Each worker has the ability to review production productivity and production efficiency percentages weekly, monthly and annually.These personal digital devices have become very powerful tools for our workers and certainly help with efficiency. We continue to strive to be an industry leader with innovative, "out of the box thinking."

In addition to bending, Albina can assist its customers by providing added processes to materials we handle. Many value-added processes can be included with our scope of work allowing our customers to receive turn key parts. Whether the parts are rolled, or standard straight sections, we are here to help.  Albina has countless pieces of fabrication equipment allowing us to provide complete parts whenever required.  Our talented fabrication personnel and equipment can reduce a customer’s lead-time and overall cost by handling some fabrication processes in house.

Albina employs several full-time welders and fabricators that carry various welding certs from AWS to fit the various needs of our customers. Our fabricators can weld steel, aluminum, stainless and copper nickel materials. We have MIG, TIG and Stud welding abilities in most of these materials. In addition to being able to weld, our fabricators and equipment allow us to add production cut (CNC), precision CNC trim (saw or plasma), punch/drill holes, CNC plasma cut holes (round, square, diamond, triangle and oval), rollbead ends of round material, flare ends of round material (37° and/or 45°), cope (manually and CNC) up to 6” OD material, split and taper both wide flange and HSS sections, cope T,K and Y connections in round and square materials, and thread or tap items.

Albina continues to grow and evolve as a full-service shop.  We have invested in CNC technology over the years to provide repeatable quality parts. Many of the secondary processes we offer customers can be performed using manual processes (for smaller quantity runs) or CNC processes (for larger quantity runs).  We are constantly adding to our capabilities and capacities. Please contact sales or estimating if you have specific questions regarding our ability to assist with your next project.

If we can’t do it….we know who can.  The industrial area of Tualatin where our facility is located is home to many businesses that can assist with the needs of your project.  We have developed some very close-knit ties with local vendors allowing us to partner up and service all of your needs.  External services such as laser cutting, hot dip galvanizing, sandblasting, painting, powder coating and precision machining are all within a mile of our facility.

I often take time at the beginning of each new year to reflect on some cool projects we have done over the years and to make sure that we get those out to the digital world and share them with steel enthusiasts. One of the coolest art projects we have been a part of was the "Molecule" by Larry Kirkland for Winona State University in Minnesota.

Albina rolled 200, 12 foot lengths of ½" SOLID ROUND 6061-T6 Aluminum to net 133 full circles. Our customer then trimmed and fabricated the "Molecule" complete.

Another Awarding Winning Project in the books for Albina Co., Inc. "The Spheres" have received the AISC 2019 IDEAS2 Presidential Award for Excellence in Fabrication! Albina bent 750,000# and 1,050 pieces rectangular tube steel bent the easy way and a portion bent off-axis for this project. Almost 8 miles of welding work and grinding was avoided because of Albina's ability to bend a portion of the project. Almost NO correction was needed during fabrication or erection as the bends fit to the fixtures within 1/32nd of an inch! Numerous Pacific Northwest businesses collaborated to make The Spheres possible. Way to Go Team & Congratulations!

The Albina Co., Inc. team recently spiraled a true HSS stair stringer to a very tight configuration for a spiral staircase project in Washington. The project consisted of using an induction heat source, on our custom made bending equipment, to spiral bend tube steel 16" X 12" X .625" WALL A500 GR B the easy way to a 77” Center Line Radius. VERY TIGHT and VERY IMPRESSIVE! Great work team!

Albina provided 109,000# of bent steel for the Eli Lilly San Diego Biotech Center in La Jolla, CA. Eli Lilly doubled the size of its research facility to 300,000 square feet during this project.

Materials included:

8" X 8" X 5/8" ANGLE A36- half of the parts rolled leg in and half of the parts rolled leg out.

Tube Steel 8" X 8" X .500" WALL A500 GR B

8 5/8" OD X .625" WALL A500B

Wide Flange W16 X 57# A992- Split into WT8 and rolled some parts stem in and rolled some parts stem out.

Wide Flange W24 X 103# A992- DOUBLE split to a finished height of 8¼" tall.  Albina then rolled some parts stem in and other stem out.