Hotpass Structural Steel · Pinchot Falls & Rust Flats · Since 2004
A weld is a promise made in metal, and the inspector should be able to read the signature.
What the shop and the rig do
The certified work
Services
Four ways we hold the building up
01
Beam & column installation — from $9.20/lb
Wide-flange beams and columns set to the survey line, bolted and field-welded to the connection schedule. House headers, garage openings and the mill buildings of Rust Flats — drawn by the engineer, placed by us, signed on the weld map by the welder who made each one.
02
Mezzanines & loft floors — from $28/SF
The square footage a building already owns, unlocked: deck, joists and the stair that serves it, load-rated and documented for the inspector and the insurer. Header cuts, point loads and the lateral the layout needs — engineered, not guessed.
03
Seismic & structural retrofits — from $84/LF
The older work: hold-downs, collectors, moment frames and the brace lines the county now insists on. The retrofit that keeps a century building standing through the event the maps say is coming — and the paperwork that proves it did.
04
Weld repair & inspection — from $180/hr
Cracked frames, failed welds, the repair nobody wants to need: drilled, grooved, re-welded to procedure and re-tested. We inspect our own work and other people’s, and we say which of the two you are paying for before the invoice.
Pinchot Falls · Rust Flats · 2024–2026
Steel on the survey line
Six certified jobs from the last two seasons — from a single header to a full mezzanine — each photographed with its weld map and its test reports beside it, because the paperwork is part of the steel.
What certification buys you
The paperwork is the steel’s memory
A weld map with a named welder on every joint, the procedure it was made to, the UT report where the code asks for one — in a folder your engineer, your insurer and your next buyer can all read. Any fabricator can make steel hold; the certified ones can prove whose hands held the stinger, and that difference is the whole resale conversation.
Stamped, mapped, traceable
Every structural weld carries the welder’s stamp and a map reference. If a question ever comes back on a joint — this decade or the next — the answer is a name, a procedure and a report, not a shrug and a callback number.
How it goes
From the drawing set to the closeout folder
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Week 1
Calcs & the procedure
The engineer’s set read against the shop’s reality: connection details clarified, weld procedures selected and written, and the test pieces coupons cut. If a detail cannot be built as drawn we say so now, with the fix attached.
Shop weeks
Fit, weld, stamp
Splices and connections made at the bench where the position is ideal — flat, shielded, to procedure. Every joint stamped as it cools, and the map updated in real time because memory is not a document.
Field days
Set & certify
Steel set to the survey line, bolted to spec torque and field-welded under the procedure card taped to the magnet. The rig carries its own weather sheet; wind and cold change the procedure, and we change with them.
Testing
UT where the code asks
Ultrasonic testing on the welds the schedule flags, witnessed and reported. Repairs, if a reading calls for them, are cut out and re-made — the coupon book and the report tell the whole story, including the boring chapters.
Closeout
The folder
Weld maps, procedures, UT reports, torque records and the as-built photographs, delivered with the invoice. The building’s next engineer starts from evidence instead of a scanner.
The engineer of record held our weld map up at the final walkthrough and said he had never seen one outside a bridge project. Every joint had a name on it, every name had a procedure behind it, and the UT report was bound like a thesis. That folder added twenty minutes to the job and twenty years to the argument it settles.
They caught that the specified connection could not be welded in the position the site would force, and proposed the alternative with the procedure attached before we broke ground. That is a fabricator reading the drawings, not just quoting them. The steel landed twice in my career without a re-shoot; both times it was Hotpass.
Our insurer asked for the UT reports and the welder certifications on the mezzanine, and the closeout folder answered every question before it was finished being asked. The premium line item on that building came down the following year.
A cracked header from another crew, found in January. They grooved it properly, welded it to a written procedure, tested it, and documented it — and the repair outlived the building’s next two renovations. I have used them on every structural repair since.
The steel questions
Before you compare bids on price
What to ask any fabricator who will touch something load-bearing — including us, and we hand you the answers before you ask.
What does “certified” actually mean in a bid?
Three documents: written welding procedures qualified to the code, welders currently certified to those procedures, and inspection records for the joints the code flags. A bid that carries none of the three is a bid to make steel hold, maybe, with no signature anywhere. Ask for the three by name and watch the cheaper bids evaporate or shape up.
Do you work from our engineer’s drawings?
Yes — that is most of the book. We read the set before quoting, flag what cannot be built as drawn, and propose the alternative with the procedure attached. What we will not do is quietly change a connection to suit the shop and leave the engineer to find out in the field.
Can you certify a weld another crew made?
No, and nobody honest can — certification belongs to the weld, the procedure and the moment. What we can do is assess it, document what it is, and where it fails the read, cut it out and replace it with one that carries our stamp. The report tells you which happened and why.
How heavy a lift can you handle?
To twelve thousand pounds with our own rig and crane coordination above that. Beams, mezzanine bundles and moment frames across Pinchot Falls and Rust Flats without subcontracting the load path. If a job needs the next crane size up, we say so at the quote, not the morning of.
Stamped, certified and insured to AWS D1.1 — the procedure cards, certs and a sample weld map travel with every bid · (555) 971-2048 · certs@hotpasssteel.example
Send the drawing set. Ask us the hard questions.
Structural drawings to certs@hotpasssteel.example — priced inside a week with the procedures, the certifications and a sample weld map attached, so the comparison with any other bid is a fair one. Pinchot Falls, Rust Flats and the structural corridor between.