Here's to a Happy and Successful New Year, Friends!
I can’t believe it is past mid-January already. Here at Huth Ben Pearson, we call November-December “Show Season”, as we attend SEMA and PRI in the performance automotive world, and FABTECH in the metal fabrication world. It is a wonderful opportunity to meet face to face with hundreds of leading fabricators.
Key themes we heard…
1. Business is pretty good for most of the fabricators we spoke with.
- In the automotive world, figuring out how to get more hp and going faster is as popular as ever. In the rest of the fabrication world, building frames out of tubing is getting more and more popular, along with quick, easy, cost effective solutions to reshaping and forming materials.
- More jobs require help bending square (we have tooling for that!).
- Lots of interest in exhaust header systems… we can help in many ways!
- Every year we find more of our machines being placed in work cells providing simple, inexpensive and quicker solutions for manufacturers.
2. The payback on a piece of equipment can be surprisingly short.
- 2-3 jobs per week in automotive can pay back a pipe bender in a few months!
- Integrating a small end forming machine into a work cell can lower operating cost, by saving labor, time and rework on jobs.
- You can save cash by bringing jobs in-house that previously were outsourced.
- We had similar “payback” conversations dozens of times...if you are getting customer requests, or are farming part of a job out, we can help you figure how quickly you can get your money back by bringing the job in-house!
3. Lots of fabrication jobs are “non-traditional”, requiring something (tooling, etc) that may not be available… call us, we may be able to help! For example, last year we helped people make trailers, we helped them connect round HVAC tubes, and we created many custom tooling solutions that helped our customers make more money.
4. Yes, we know we need more stuff that helps people with jobs that are bigger than 3 inch… we are working on it, and hope to have some more useful tools this year!
Thanks for interacting with us last year. Let us help you have an even more successful 2017!
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