Production welding & fixtures · Draperville, at the Knapp Works · Est. 2014
Two hundred of the same frame. All of them square.
Strut & Ferrule runs production fabrication out of Bay 3 of the old Knapp Works — machine guards, conveyor frames, weld fixtures and mezzanine rails, cut on our own plasma table and pinned square on jigs our toolroom built. Flux-core on plate over ten millimetres (0.045 E71T-1 at 26 volts), TIG where a weld shows, first articles on every run. The fifth piece off the jig matches the five-hundredth.
The tolerances we sign for
Services
What leaves Bay 3
01
Machine guards & cages — $58–84 / sq ft
Guarding built to the table your insurer actually reads: mesh or sheet, interlock mounts fitted, hinged panels wherever the maintenance schedule says hands go. Rated, tagged, and designed to come off in five minutes for a belt change.
02
Conveyor frames & guide rails — by run
Straight, bowed or spiral, welded on length jigs and checked on the granite bed. Rails arrive with mounting holes matched to your floor, not to a template that assumes your floor is flat — we ask for the survey, or we bring the level.
03
Weld & check fixtures — from $2,600
Toolroom-ground locators, toggle clamps where thumbs get tired, and a check fixture that says GO or NO-GO before the part leaves your cell. A fixture that hides variation is worse than no fixture; ours argue loudly.
04
Mezzanines & platforms — engineered
Deck, stringers and guards calculated for the use you actually intend, stamped drawings in the set, bolt-up field joints so the mill floor does not meet an arc. Load placard bolted to the top rail, laminated.
The Knapp Works
Bay 3, and why the toolroom runs the shop
Anyone can weld a hundred frames; the trick is that the hundredth was laid on the same jig as the first, by a hand that has not drifted, on a machine with a wire-feed log. Our toolroom builds the jigs, our bay fills them, and the granite surface plate settles arguments between them. That is the entire company, in one sentence.
The fifth and the five-hundredth
Every run ships with a first-article report and a last-piece check against the same drawing. If a part you receive falls outside tolerance, the remake and the freight are ours — both statements, in writing, on the quote.
Print to dock
How a run goes
Four steps, the same whether it is ten guards or two thousand fittings. The only variable is how many times the jig gets loaded.
The print
Send the drawing, the DXF, or the broken part it replaces — the plasma table reads all three after we redraw them properly. Missing dimensions get a phone call, not a guess.
The first article
One piece, fully finished, delivered with a dimension report. You measure it against your part before we cut two hundred of anything.
The run
Jig-built and logged; heat numbers kept where the mill certificate matters. Runs over fifty pieces get a mid-run squareness check with the results written on the traveller.
The dock
Palletised, tagged with the run number, delivered on our own truck inside three counties. Freight beyond that is arranged, not improvised.
Draperville & three counties, 2025 — 2026
The bay’s output
Six runs from a year of jig work. Where a caption gives a count, that is pieces off one jig, one tolerance, one report.
Three counties say
The people who re-order
Two hundred guards, and the re-order was for MORE — because row six wanted the same hinged doors row two got. Every panel within a nickel of every other. Nobody says that about fabricators.
Their check fixture caught our casting drift before our customer did. The NO-GO side of that fixture has paid for itself four times over, and our auditor now asks for Strut & Ferrule’s first-article sheets by name.
The mezzanine drawings arrived stamped before we thought to ask. The inspector passed the steel on paper and the bolts on torque, and the crew was off our floor a day early.
Before you send a print
Straight answers
The five questions every production manager asks first. The bay line at the bottom answers between shifts, and the fax still works — some plants still live by it.
What lot sizes make sense?
Ten to two thousand. Under ten you are paying for jig time and should probably buy welding hours; over two thousand we talk about a second shift before we talk about a discount. The sweet spot — where our number is hard to beat — is fifty to five hundred.
Can you hold certifications on the steel?
Mill test reports travel with every heat we buy, and the heat number is written on the traveller beside the parts cut from it. If your spec wants CWB or AWS D1.1 procedures on structural welds, Bay 3 has two certified hands and the logs to prove they welded.
Hot-dip or powder for guards?
Indoors, zinc-rich primer under a safety-colour polyester powder — tough, clean, repairable. Anywhere a hose lives or the air is salt, we hot-dip first and powder over the zinc; the kettle wins every argument with weather. The quote says which finish and why, per part.
Do you keep our jig?
Three years, racked and tagged with your run number. A re-run inside that window quotes in a day, because the setup already exists — that is the quiet discount of dealing with a shop that keeps its tooling honest.
What about delivery?
Our own truck inside three counties — Draperville, Halls Ferry and the ferry counties — and common carrier beyond, palletised and strapped the way a forklift driver respects. Dock appointments kept to the half hour.
First articles inside 48 hours of a clean print · (555) 016-9077 · runs@strutandferrule.example