Person

Under the Deck

DP Deanna Pryor

Field repair, shop fabrication, and the paperwork nobody photographs. This is what nineteen years of arc time looks like, including the jobs that were ugly to get to. If you are trying to decide whether to hire us, this section will tell you more than a price will.

01 Field and Bridge

Structural repair on state and county bridges, mill structures and river equipment. Cold, high, and documented.

Girder web repair, county bridge, Turtle Creek

Fracture critical girder repair on a 1961 county bridge, done overnight under D1.5 with full inspection sign-off.

Inspection found a crack propagating from a coped web at a diaphragm connection on a two-girder bridge, which is about as fracture critical as it gets. County wanted it done with the road open by six in the morning. We drilled the crack tip to stop it, ground out the full section, preheated to 200 degrees, and ran it out in flux core with a certified D1.5 procedure and an inspector on the deck the whole time. UT clean on first pass. Off the bridge at 4:40am. The useful detail: we had the procedure qualification record already on file, which is why we got the call at nine the previous evening instead of somebody spending two days qualifying a weld.

Outage repair, Mon Valley works

Eleven days of structural repair inside a working mill during a scheduled outage, with a hard restart deadline.

Scheduled outage, fixed window, everything else in the plant waiting on us. Column base repairs, a conveyor support rebuild and about ninety feet of handrail that had corroded to the point of being decorative. Working in a mill during an outage means hot work permits, fire watch, confined space entries and a lot of standing around waiting for a permit to clear. Actual arc time was maybe forty percent of hours on site and anyone who bids that work as if it is eighty percent is going to lose money and cut corners. We finished a day early. They called us back in the spring.
02 Shop Work

Stairs, rails, lintels and frames fabricated in Hazelwood. Mostly for contractors, occasionally for people who found us and wanted something specific.

Sixty feet of egress stair, Lawrenceville building

Four flights of code-compliant steel egress stair fabricated, galvanized and set in three days on a tight site.

Four flights, mono stringer would have been prettier but the budget said channel stringers with bar grating treads, which is fine and will outlive everyone involved. We field measured after the shell was up rather than trusting the drawings, which saved us, because the actual floor to floor was three quarters of an inch off on the second landing. Fabricated in ten days, sent it out for hot dip galvanizing, set it with a rented crane over a Saturday. Inspector signed it Monday morning. No punch list.

Repair work we say yes to

The small jobs other shops turn down, and why we keep taking them.

Cracked bucket on a skid steer. A broken gate hinge on a church in Homestead. A trailer tongue somebody hit a curb with. A hospital bed frame, once, which I still have questions about. Bigger shops will not touch a two hundred dollar repair because it disrupts the schedule. We keep one afternoon a week for it. Partly because the margin on small repair is honestly good, and partly because the guy whose skid steer we fixed in 2021 has sent us about ninety thousand dollars of work since. If you have something broken and you are not sure it is worth fixing, send me a photo. I will tell you straight if it is cheaper to replace.
03 Certification and Training

Current qualifications, and how the apprenticeship actually runs here.

What we hold

Current welder qualifications and insurance, listed plainly so you do not have to ask.

AWS D1.1 structural, plate and tube, all positions, current. AWS D1.5 bridge welding, current, renewed annually. ASME Section IX 6G pipe, carbon and stainless. OSHA 30. Confined space and fall protection, current. Two million general liability, one million auto, full Pennsylvania workers compensation on all three of us. Certificates of insurance go out the same day you ask for them. Welder continuity records are maintained monthly, which sounds like a small thing until an inspector asks for six months of continuity and the other shop cannot produce it.

Public registry where you can verify any welder's AWS credentials yourself, including ours.

🔗AWS certification lookupaws.org↗