No Hiding In The Ductwork In North Grafton | Family company specializes in really big jobs
Kevin Magill, of All Steel Fabricating in North Grafton.
If you’ve driven the region’s highways, I’m sure you’ve seen heavy-duty flat bed trucks accompanied by fleets of “OVERSIZE LOAD” bedecked vehicles hauling monstrous hunks of unidentifiable steel to who-knows-where.
And although All Steel Fabricating in North Grafton isn’t in an industrial park, what they do is, perhaps more than most other companies I’ve featured in this column, is industrial strength. At one time or another, one of those massive pieces of equipment you’ve seen hauled down the highway was built at All Steel’s 20,000-square-foot and expanding facility off Creeper Hill Road.
With help from a $1.66 million tax exempt bond from MassDevelopment, All Steel is erecting a 9,600-square-foot addition to its manufacturing facility and a 3,000-square-foot addition to its offices. The bond has also allowed the company to add three more employees to its 23-person staff, and it has plans to add two or three more, said Kevin Magill, whose father started the company in 1968.
When Magill’s father Jim started the company, it was a two-man operation, and it slowly and steadily grew to the position it’s in today. That growth has come by supplying some of the region’s bread-and-butter industries. Magill says the company builds a lot of machine bases for plastics extrusion companies right here in Central Massachusetts.
Duct Tales
The stuff you might notice on the back of a flatbed, however, is most likely the heavy-duty fabricated ductwork the company makes for a variety of industries, most notably, power plants. Magill said All Steel’s ductwork can be found in Wheelabrator plants as well as in the Mt. Tom Power Plant run by Northeast Utilities in Holyoke.
At many power plants, All Steel’s ducts carry and redistribute gas. These days, the ductwork systems are being designed to help power plants burn cleaner, Magill said.
All Steel has also fabricated ducting for plants that process wood waste for biofuel.
Some of the sections of ducting for these applications are large enough to dwarf the trucks that haul them. And the processes used to create these pieces is equally large. All Steel is capable of shearing, punching and bending steel at its plant and it claims one of the largest press brakes in New England.
That piece of machinery is a 24-foot monster with a 1,000-ton capacity. That means it can bend a half-inch steel plate 24 feet long in one shot.
To move that kind of stuff around, All Steel has five 10-ton cranes and with the new addition, it plans to add two 20-ton cranes.
And like many other businesses these days, All Steel is looking to move as much of its work as possible in-house. Part of the addition also includes a new high-definition plasma cutting table.
The cutting table will allow All Steel to do a lot more high-accuracy steel cutting and beveling as well as milling and drilling all in one unit.
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