Carolina Metal Fabricators Is Expanding: A New 20,000 Sq Ft Structural Steel Facility
Carolina Metal Fabricators is expanding. We have taken on a new 20,000-square-foot building that will become our dedicated structural steel production facility.
It is not finished. Crews are still on site. But the columns are set, the first machines are finding their homes, and the concrete is curing.
Here is what it means for the contractors and plant engineers we build for.
What the new facility adds
The building is dedicated to structural steel production, which is the point of it.
Today, structural work shares floor space with everything else we fabricate. Giving structural its own building means jobs stop competing for the same bays, the same cranes and the same crew hours.
Three things change for the work we take on:
Capacity. More floor and more staging space, so more jobs move through at once instead of queuing behind each other.
Processing. The new floor is laid out around our processing equipment rather than around whatever fit in the old space.
Distribution. Direct highway access. Loaded steel gets from our floor to your site without working its way out of a crowded yard first.
What it means if you buy steel
The expansion is about schedule, which is usually what a fabricator is actually being judged on.
General contractors live and die by the sequence. Steel that shows up late moves every trade behind it, and steel that shows up mislabeled costs a day in the field. More capacity means fewer occasions where your job waits on somebody else's.
Plant engineers and EPC contractors tend to care about a different thing: whether the shop can hold the spec on a job with real complexity. A dedicated structural building means structural jobs are not sharing a floor with unrelated work while that gets sorted out.
Neither group has to change anything about how they work with us. Same estimating process, same points of contact, same drawings.
What is not changing
Everything that made the work good is coming with us.
Same crew. Same AWS-certified welding. Same 50 to 100 ton structural jobs turned around faster than the larger shops can quote them. We still scribe beams and columns so your erector spends less time figuring out what goes where.
A bigger building does not make a fabricator better. It makes a good fabricator able to say yes more often.
Still under wraps
There is one piece going into the building that we are saving for the reveal.
We will not spoil it here. It is the part everyone who walks the floor asks about first, and it deserves a better introduction than a paragraph in a blog post.
We are posting progress on LinkedIn as the building comes together, and the full unveiling follows once we are finished.
Have a project coming up? Send us your drawings. We are quoting now, and the new floor only makes the answer faster.
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