Page 22 - MetalForming January 2014

Staying Atop the
Laser-Cutting Landscape
This specialist in high-performance automotive-exhaust fabrication expands into contract manufacturing, beginning with investing in laser-cutting technology. A new 6-kW machine equipped for tube cutting helps the firm stay one step ahead of the competition.
No one customer accounts for more than five percent of the business at Stainless Works, Chagrin Falls, OH, and that’s exactly how owner Ron Fuller likes it. The for- mer high school industrial-arts teacher and owner of an automotive-restora- tion company acquired Stainless Works in 1995. Since then he’s successfully expanded the business from strictly fabricating stainless-steel exhaust sys- tems for performance vehicles into a fully functional tube- and sheet-fabri-
cation job shop.
“Stainless is in our name, but we
fabricate—laser-cut, form and weld— everything including mild steel, alu- minum and titanium,” Fuller says. Some 75 percent of the material moving through the 50,000-sq.-ft. 42-employee shop falls under the exhaust column of Fuller’s spreadsheet, the rest on the job-shop side.
“We’re working hard to grow the custom-fab side,” he says, “and think 50-50 is a reasonable target.”
That will be a difficult target to hit, since the performance-vehicle exhaust business grows an average of 35 percent
BY BRAD F. KUVIN, EDITOR
Most of the production at Stainless Works involves fabricating high-performance stain- less-steel automotive exhaust systems. Manual gas-tungsten-arc welding assembles laser-cut flanges and bent tube.
20 MetalForming/January 2014
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