Question: What is the biggest difference in how your company assesses a job now versus before the pandemic?
Answer: The biggest difference for us is to focus on communicating our policies and procedures for the COVID response with our customers and incorporating language into our contracts, which allows us to react in unnecessary manner. There have been a few COVID delays in some of our projects, nothing major. But we have had a few impacts on a few projects where people showed up to the job site, and maybe had exposures or came up with COVID. So, we’ve had to do all the things that you’d have to do when you get exposed — sometimes stop the work for a few days till we can contract trace and figure out who’s exposed, who’s been exposed, etc. Really, it’s just communicating with all of our stakeholders and making sure our customers are aware of some of the impacts when they occur.

Q: What are the top challenges and opportunities facing your industry in 2021 and beyond?
A: For opportunities, this year — and probably for 2022 — there’s a very high demand for new industrial buildings, which is the bulk of our type of construction. That demand has been driven by the acceleration due to COVID of more goods being bought online and having to be delivered to people’s houses. That’s been driving our market sector property heavily. We’re as busy as we’ve ever been and we have more projects in the pipeline than we’ve ever had in terms of industrial. The main challenges we’re facing nowadays is steel and wood and plastic products have all become in high demand. Manufacturers right now have way more demand than they can actually manufacture and supply, so lead-time to getting materials to job sites is stretching out. In addition, there are cost escalations going on in the marketplace based on the inverted supply-demand ratio right now. And then thirdly, the top challenges and opportunities we have is finding and hiring quality people. Our business here locally is kind of limited because we have a small population. Companies like ours have to kind of sit back and balance our resources, because we can’t take on necessarily everything we get an opportunity to look at, so we have to look at our resources to make sure that we can perform the work without killing our people with overtime. So, that’s a kind of balancing act right now for a lot of companies here.

Q: With the need for masks, social distancing and other measures, how do you address safety in the workplace differently now?
A: We follow the Washoe County Health Department and CDC guidelines. And additional to the traditional safety items, we also ensure the proper use of personal protection equipment, and social distancing, health assessments, proper sanitation facilities, and cleaning protocols. We’re reducing meeting sizes or changing locations to safely support larger groups, as well as additional documentation to record those efforts and support possible contact tracing as necessary. And we’re communicating that with our field staffs on a regular basis. Our field supervision project control teams are well-versed in these requirements; they’re on top of this stuff every day at the job site.

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This ultimate makers space will be a machining resource for the including wind energy, aerospace, architecture, infrastructure, marine and transportation industries. Innovative designers from all over the United States can have this plant mill the composite patterns and molds they are creating.

We sat down with Andy Jones and Symmetrix Owner John Barnitt to learn more about the project:

United: Is John Barnitt a hands-on kind of owner who visits the site often and pays close attention to the details?

Andy: Absolutely. He is very helpful, and it has been a pleasure working with him.

United: Do innovations flow out of the 26-foot-wide rollup door that opens into the location of the bank of state-of-the-art 5-axis CNC machines?

Andy: They move projects out and over to the north door into a paint booth  The booth is currently not shown on construction documents. It will be a revision at some point. The other rollup doors will be used for bringing in raw materials and parts.

United: Is the building higher on one end to accommodate the viewer platform looking into the bay of 20 CNC machine?

Andy: I believe the overall height was determined for what will be manufactured and clearance needed for the CNC machine. With that, the height of building at the north and south end was determined by slope requirements to meet building codes.

United: John, do you see the Minden facility as bigger or better or different than the facilities in Rhode Island and North Carolina?

John: The Minden facility is actually based on the RI and NC tooling shops with the goal to make these as similar as possible.

United: Will other parts of the facility be more basic machines and equipment?

John: Yes, a smaller a 25 foot 5-Axis milling machine, fabrication area with welding, composite lamination areas and a 90 foot climate controlled spray booth.

United: CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control, which allows a user to dial in a machine to mill a product, but what does the 5-axis part allow a user to do?

John: This machine mills composite shapes in five directions. The word Axis refers to the direction of travel of the cutting head, in this case…

• X-Axis=82 feet (East and west)
• Y-Axis=22 feet (North and South)
• Z-Axis= 10 feet of vertical travel
• B-Axis= 360° of cutting head rotation
• C-Axis= 270° of diagonal head rotation

Additionally, I’d like to draw attention to the CNC machine reinforcement in the floor and the recessed steel mounting plates.

Andy: The CNC machine rests on 68 embedded steel plates 31”x10”x ¾”. After leveling it will be bolted down to 545 anchor bolts, with 8 bolts per plate. The footprint of the machine is 33’ x 95’. The footing consisted of upper and lower #6 rebar and about 150 yards of concrete.

John sets the bar rather high for a really cool shop. Don’t try doing this at home.

The post Q&A with the Symmetrix Composite Tooling project team appeared first on United Construction.