Case Study: Upright Iron
65% of Jobs Now Done on the A400
- The A400's ability to work with a variety of shapes allows Upright Iron to take on new jobs
- Upright Iron cut 100 dock stairs over a 2 month period, an enormous increase from previous methods
- The A400 paid for itself within 1 year
Upright Iron Works president Elizabeth Mate-Bias is always on the lookout for ways to increase productivity and grow her business. The woman-owned fabrication shop, located in Griffith, Indiana, specializes in stairs and railings for commercial spaces, general contractors and structural steel fabricators.
Upright Iron recently expanded its production floor and now boasts more than 17,000 square feet, with more than 20 employees. Their location also includes an acre of land for storing raw materials and finished products.
Stairs and railings are its bread-and-butter. Upright Iron cuts a tremendous amount of tube and pipe from a range of metals, including steel, stainless steel, aluminum, bronze and brass. It also performs finishing tasks like galvanizing, powder coating, anodizing and more.
Like most fabrication shops, Upright Iron never knows what its next job might entail — whether it’s round tube or angle, or specialty shapes like WTs. Mate-Bias knew Upright Iron needed to automate some of its manual tasks to take on more work and grow the business. This was particularly important for cutting stair clips, drilling rung holes and galvanizing railings. The company also needed tube and pipe production equipment with the versatility to work with a variety of shapes, so it could confidently take on nearly any new project without trying to convince the customer to use a shape Upright Iron could manage.
Mate-Bias found all of that in Bend-Tech’s A400 CNC tube and pipe plasma cutting technology. It provides her shop with the ideal combination of hardware and software to improve its productivity and profitability.
Upright Iron Meets the Bend-Tech A400
Upright Iron was one of the first companies to purchase Bend-Tech’s original A150 CNC Tube and Pipe Cutter. Due to the nature of the machine, it was used for round railing alone. The company was relying on a plasma table and saw for most all other jobs.
That changed in spring of 2022 when Mate-Bias attended a meeting of the Upper Midwest chapter of NOMMA at Bend-Tech’s headquarters in Osceola, Wisconsin. There she was first introduced to the A400. Beyond its ability to cut, mark, align and engrave tube and pipe, what intrigued Mate-Bias most was its ability to cut channel and angle materials (as well as round, square and rectangle). She immediately envisioned how the machine could cut production time and improve productivity, and quickly added an A400 to her shop.
Mate-Bias appreciates the combination of the powerful A400 CNC tube and pipe cutter, with the sophisticated yet intuitive CAD/CAM software that comes with Bend-Tech machines. She particularly likes the software’s ability to work with other programs. “We use AutoCAD Advanced Steel and the DXF files go right into that software very nicely,” said Mate-Bias. Because Upright Iron performs in-house detailing, the detailer can get the files ready for the A400 easily and then load the software without any issues.
Powerful Technology Makes Light Work of Stair Clips & Ladders
Upright Iron spends a good portion of their fabrication efforts on stairs — a once laborious process — which the combination of the powerful A400 with Bend-Tech SE software significantly speeds up.
As Mate-Bias explained, “The A400 can do square tubing, rectangular tubing, channel and angles, which increased our capabilities using that machine. All of our clip angles for our stringers that have holes in them are now done by the A400. It’s so much easier to just run a whole stick of angle through there, cut it to four-inch pieces, put all the slotted holes in it and have them all done completely.”
From November to December of 2023, Upright Iron was able to cut more than 100 dock stairs using the A400, an enormous production increase from previous methods. Another area where the A400 shines for Upright Iron is ladders made from channel. Their previous method involved running three-inch channel through a drill press and then trying to align all the holes.
Now, Upright Iron can perform the entire process on the A400. According to Mate-Bias, “We will cut the channel, put holes for all the rungs in it, and then the fabricator just slides the rungs in and welds it up, and it’s done. We also use it when we have slotted holes in channels or in clips or tubing that require slotted holes. You can’t find a punch that can do a big enough slotted hole, but with the A400, you can do whatever size slotted holes you want. That makes it so versatile for all of our stuff. The increased efficiency in our shop because of the A400 has been valuable, in that we can take on more work.”
Training & Customer Support at the Ready
Learning to use a new piece of equipment can appear daunting, but Bend-Tech’s customer support team impressed Upright Iron. Two employees were trained on-site at Bend-Tech, who were then able to train a third employee back at the shop. Upright Iron also regularly leans on Bend-Tech’s customer support staff to answer questions about making particular cuts or new software capabilities. If there is a problem, everyone at Upright Iron appreciates the speed and flexibility of Bend-Tech’s customer support.
“The greatest thing about Bend-Tech is they're very supportive and have extremely helpful tech support you can call at any time and get somebody to walk you through something that might not be working the way you want it to...”
Fast Return on Investment
Incorporating the Bend-Tech A400 into their operations has allowed Upright Iron to grow the business by increasing production and taking on more work. Today, Mate-Bias estimates 65% of Upright Iron’s jobs are done on the A400, proving to be a wise investment for the company.
“We did a hundred dock stairs in the final two months of last year. There is no possible way we could have done that without the A400."
