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A look at a modern water tank fabricating facility

Oct 14, 2024Oct 14, 2024

Maguire’s new fabricating facility for water tanks and towers in Sioux Falls, S.D., will help it produce subassemblies more efficiently and open the doors to new products, particularly larger tanks that it couldn’t make work in its older facility.

When a facility is a constraint to growth, a company needs to have a serious conversation about possible moves. For Maguire, Sioux Falls, S.D., this was a literal move, not just a figurative one.

Maguire started having those serious discussions in 2020. Its 1990s-era manufacturing campus, comprised of three manufacturing buildings and about 60,000 sq. ft. of shop floor space, had been sufficient for many years, but it made any possible business growth in the company’s water tower fabrication business difficult. (Maguire, formerly known as Maguire Iron, was a longtime player in water tower maintenance and repair until it purchased Master Tank of Slayton, Minn., in 1982, which added design, fabrication, and erection capabilities to the company’s offerings. Today, Maguire is one of the few companies that specialize both in maintenance and fabrication of water towers.)

In an episode of The Maguire Podcast from Jan. 4, Dan Engelsman, Maguire’s senior vice president of construction, said any new building had to be conducive to better material flow. In the old configuration, too many parts were moving far too much between processes.

“We were cutting in one building. We might have been rolling in a different building, and then we had to blast and paint in a different building as well,” he said. “We knew those were our challenges.”

Additionally, any move would enable Maguire to rejuvenate its fabricating equipment. Its plasma cutting table and its plate rolling equipment could only accommodate steel thicknesses up to 1.5 in., which limited the company to fabricating water storage tanks that held a maximum of 750,000 gallons. Larger storage sizes and tanks in seismic or wind zones require supports made of steel thicker than 1.5 in.

By 2022, Maguire had committed to building a new facility. “We visited other facilities that where older and they had been added on over the years. We saw some of the limitations that they ran into,” Engelsman said. “It was a good learning process all around.”

Months were spent trying to figure out the right configuration for the new facility. Engelsman said that original drawings started out with a square design, but they figured out that the layout wouldn’t work. A long, skinny building design made a bit more sense, but it didn’t provide the space needed for consistent and efficient product flow, particularly after visiting other metal fabricators to see the modern metal fabricating equipment they were using.

After more than 100 different equipment layout mock-ups, the Maguire team decided that a longer building indeed made sense, but it had to be wide enough to accommodate two production lines, with one side housing 20-ton cranes. (The maximum tonnage of cranes at the old campus was 10 tons.)

Today, Maguire operates out of a state-of-the-art facility that is set up for efficient processing of more than 6 million lbs. of steel this year and can accommodate more in the future. The 450-ft.-long by 152-ft.-wide building has 40-ft. walls, giving it the hook height to accommodate workpieces for larger tank and tower fabrications. And it’s just a little over 4 miles from its previous location.

“It all starts with staging our material,” Engelsman said. Now it has room to accommodate all of those deliveries on the east end of the building.

New 20-ton cranes provide Maguire with more lifting capacity than it had in its previous facility.

From there, the material moves to one of two plasma cutting tables, one of which came over from the previous facility. The new plasma system has a 300-amp power source and a 12- by 56-ft. table, almost double the size of the other table. Capable of plasma cutting 2.5-in.-thick steel, the table also can cut up to 10-in. steel with the oxyfuel torch.

Given its capabilities, the new plasma cutting system handles larger parts while the older table is now dedicated to cutting lighter material.

Cranes are still needed to move material from one stage of production to another, but these new cranes offer many more safety features than the ones used in the old facility. Keeping employees safe was a main motivator for many of the decisions that influenced building design and equipment selection, according to Engelsman.

For instance, all cranes are equipped with sensors and bumpers to prevent them from colliding, which could likely happen if not for the safety devices because several cranes use the same runways in the new building. Also, when workpieces or subassemblies are attached to the cranes, anti-swaying devices prevent loads from swinging around, potentially harming employees.

Once cut, the workpieces advance to either a press to be formed or a plate roller.

The press is an enclosed-box type of press from Italian manufacturer Seravesi. It replaced a 1940s-era, 600-ton, C-frame Bliss stamping press.

“It has an 11-ft.-wide opening into the bed where the dies sit. So we can put really wide material through that bed size,” Engelsman said. “It also has two individual cylinders, so you can operate one if you’re maybe doing some smaller items. But you also can tie both cylinders together with a bolster plate. Altogether, we have 1,200 tons of pressing capacity.”

The press is used to form sections of the water tanks that are then welded together into subassemblies. Those portions of the water tank are delivered to the erection site, where they are joined together to create the tanks. Everything leaving the Maguire facility is designed to fit on typical flatbed trailers, eliminating the need to schedule transportation specialists who might deal with oversized truckloads.

Seravesi also provided the two new plate rolling machines for the new building. Both are three-roll machines. One is a 10-ft.-wide machine with 260 tons of power. The other also is 10 ft. wide but has 550 tons of forming power.

“The difference in these rollers than what we’re used to is that they are what’s called variable geometry machines,” Engelsman said. “The bottom rolls can move in and out. They can pivot at any angle as well to roll cones.”

Maguire uses its new enclosed box press to form sections of a water tank.

Unlike other metal fabricators, Maguire doesn’t preheat its material before forming. Such a temperature change runs the risk of altering the steel’s makeup, something that should be averted at all costs when the material is expected to be part of a structure supporting and storing tons of water.

“We run A36 steel through all of our machines,” Engelsman said. “Because of the mills refining their processes, steel has gotten harder and harder over the years. So instead of 0.036ths yield, we’re rolling 0.048 to 0.055ths yield, and we’re doing it cold with these machines. It takes some power to do it.”

Rolled sections next head to the sub arc welding station, where they are placed on huge rollers and tack welded together as they rotate. Previously, two rolled sections, or cans, had to be brought together with cranes, and operators had to try and bring them together in the air. Then people were needed to bang the sections together with hammers and pins.

“There’s no more banging the steel and climbing on top to start the tack welds,” Engelsman said. “We’re going to see a lot of efficiency gains there as well.”

Every subassembly that leaves Maguire has an inorganic zinc primer that’s applied in the company’s new paint booth. But before that can happen, the parts need to be blasted to clean the surfaces of any oils, dirt, and other materials along with creating the right blast profile.

At the old location, the blasting process involved three individuals who manually blasted parts each day. Because of this and the relatively small size of the blasting room, the process was another bottleneck area.

The manual blasting process also was an area that had the greatest risk of injury. The combination of people being in a room where compressed air was being used to fling grit at large metal subassemblies was enough to make any safety manager lose sleep at night.

In the new building, a much larger blast room occupies space near the west end of the building. But instead of relying on operators to deliver the blast media, a robot does the job.

One operator sits in a cab with protective glass and guides a blasting arm with two No. 12 nozzles. The operator maneuvers the robot arm with a joystick.

The robot also has a learning function where any job that might be a candidate for repeat work can be recorded, so that the job can be implemented in the future without the need for an operator.

A portion of a water tower support column is rolled on one of Maguire’s two new plate rollers.

Engelsman and the Maguire team had the chance to see another robotic blast booth in action, prior to committing to one for the new facility, during a visit to a Texas manufacturing facility for rail cars. He said a conversation with the operator indicated that he “loved” the work, especially when considering the manual alternative.

“That same guy was doing the work of four other people, and he was doing it in half the time, which was really impressive,” he said.

Reducing the risk of injury in the new facility was paramount when it came to stocking it with new fabricating technology, according to Maguire company officials. But that was only a small piece of the overall puzzle. The entire effort was guided by putting employees first in almost every decision related to the building.

“We want to be the employer of choice in this region for manufacturing,” said Brian Cooper, Maguire’s vice president of business development. “That’s why we looked at this building 180 degrees differently [than others might have done].”

Prior to embarking on the new construction journey, Maguire leadership met with employees and asked them what the main priorities should be when it came to building a new manufacturing home. The results were safety, innovation, and employee comfort.

“Anytime we can listen to our team members’ ideas, and use them in a project like this, it makes our company better,” Maguire President Scott Jones said at the time. “They are the people who are doing the work every day and know what would improve their jobs.”

Maguire reached out to BranchPattern, a firm with experience designing spaces and buildings that focuses on workers’ well-being, to help manifest the employees’ desires in a new physical structure. Many of those initial wishes are now evident in the new manufacturing facility, which started fabricating parts in August.

One of the first things a visitor to the new building might notice is actual sunlight entering the shop. Two levels of windows mark the entire length of the building. Complementing that are solar tubes, which capture natural light from the roof and reflect it to an internal apparatus inside the building, and LED lights that mimic outdoor lighting.

The precast concrete walls also enable the facility to be energy efficient and comfortable for employees. The walls do a good job of keeping the warmth in during the winter and maintaining the coolness provided by air conditioning in the summer.

“Some of the other kinds of nice features are air exchangers,” Engelsman said. “They have monitors all through the fabrication floor. If they sense the environment or the air quality is not quite where it should be, it’ll turn on the exchangers in the back of the building, exchange the air in the building, and shut back off. It’s always keeping that nice level of clean air in the facility as well.”

Maguire’s new submerged arc welding equipment allows an operator to control the welding process via a monitor, instead of having to climb on top of the subassembly for a clear view of the welding process.

The commitment to clean air extends to the welding department, where vacuums attached to any gas metal arc welding torch clear out fumes at the source. Welders don’t have to worry about the smoke rolling in under the hood as they weld through a shift.

“We’ve had a lot of amazing comments from our team members just about the cleanliness of the new facility. The simple stuff makes a difference,” Cooper said.

Maguire is on its way to becoming the first company in South Dakota to attain Fitwel certification. (What is Fitwel? Imagine LEED certification that signifies a building is built and run in a way that minimally impacts the environment, but in this case, the certification is focused on a building’s ability to foster a safe and healthy environment for employees.) This not only highlights the company’s effort to minimize the risk of illness and injury for those who work at Maguire, but it also takes steps to promote and maintain a healthy lifestyle for employees, both from a physical and mental standpoint. That’s why the new building has things that aren’t commonly found in a manufacturing facility, such as a gym, a locker room, a walking path, and even vending machines with healthy options, not just chips and candy bars.

Even though Maguire has only been actively cutting, forming, welding, blasting, and painting parts in the new building for a few months, everyone knows the new layout and equipment are going to make a huge difference. Cooper said management expects that the company can increase manufacturing throughput by 50% in the new facility with the same team members that it had before the move.

“It’s going to take us probably a year or so to get there so that we realize that efficiency. It’s just a matter of getting the processes going,” he said.

It turns out putting employees in a position where they enjoy work and can maximize their efforts without draining themselves on a daily basis is a pretty good move for a company to make.