06 Jan Comparing Steel Fabrication and Manufacturing of Steel Beams
Most who’ve previously purchased steel products for their site have probably heard the terms fabrication and manufacturing used in conversation. Still, they may not understand what these two terms mean. If that’s the case, it’s probably reassuring to know that you’re not the only one – it’s very common for these two terms to be used interchangeably.
Before you begin to contact online steel suppliers to place orders for your next project, it’s worth understanding what these terms mean to know what services your potential suppliers can provide. Therefore, Baker Steel Trading has created this helpful guide to hopefully solve any confusion surrounding the meaning of both terms and explain whether there’s any difference between the two.
What is Steel Manufacturing?
When people use the term “manufacturing” regarding steel, they’re referring to the process of converting raw steel into a finished product. Structural steel manufacturing involves large scale production and using a wide range of machinery and tools, helping to create products with the high strength-to-weight ratio that steel is renowned for.
What is Steel Fabrication?
One of the most commonly used terms in construction projects, structural steel fabrication, involves using various techniques and processes to combine numerous steel parts and create bespoke steel products for every client. The range of tasks includes cutting, bending and assembling, each of which is chosen based on the needs of the particular product.
Fabricating structural steel beams before their arrival on a building construction site dramatically reduces the construction time of the project and helps to increase the quality of the final assembly. Our team here at Baker Steel Trading have years of experience in structural steel fabrication and can work with you to supply high-quality fabricated products.
How To Compare Steel Fabrication and Manufacturing
After reading the above information, don’t worry if you’re still unsure how to differentiate between steel fabrication and manufacturing; there are easy ways to learn to compare the two. The easiest way to understand the differences between fabricating and manufacturing steel is to compare the two processes based on three essential parts of working with steel.
What Does the Process Involve?
For many who regularly work with steel, understanding the number of processes required by a job is the best way to differentiate between fabrication and manufacturing tasks.
Manufacturing steel is the whole sequence of tasks that start with the raw materials necessary to craft the steel items, using large-scale industrial operations to assist in the final assembly of a product. In contrast, steel fabrication uses advanced assembly techniques such as welding to bring together the manufactured steel, creating the final requested product so that it’s ready to deliver to the client.
What is the Application for this Process?
In this case, “application” refers to the reason for the use of either fabrication or manufacturing the steel. Therefore, the manufacturing process is just to produce the universal steel beams or other products from raw steel as required. In comparison, steel fabrication has a much more comprehensive range of applications, turning this manufactured steel into structural steel buildings, machinery and other products.
What is the Aim of this Task?
Depending on the nature of each specific order for structural steel, the goals of both manufacturing and fabricating steel can differ or feed into each other. When manufacturing universal columns or beams, the aim is to create structural steel parts from the raw materials that have been supplied, which the relevant parties can then send to be easily fabricated. Structural steel fabrication aims to use manufactured steel to create sustainable and durable components and structures.
Order High-Quality Steel Beams Today
Hopefully, having read the information included in this blog post, you now have a better understanding of what manufacturing and fabricating steel mean and the differences between these two terms. If you require structural steel fabrication services for a site based across the South East of England, Baker Steel Trading can help.
Our experienced steel fabricators can fabricate and supply structural steel beams, channels and columns according to the requirements of your project and for a competitive price.
For more information about the range of services that we can provide, or if you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to get in contact with Baker Steel Trading.