Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) produces a report card to grade different aspects of the nation’s infrastructure. With a few exceptions in the most recent report card, ASCE handed out C’s and D’s across the board, calling for the U.S. to make massive investments in all essential infrastructures from bridges and airports to dams, roads, and railways.
The 2013 Report Card found a huge backlog of maintenance on current infrastructure, as well as an urgent need for modernization. Despite these challenges, the ASCE projected that the U.S. can develop a plan to promote sustainability, and renew and maintain its infrastructure by 2020, a commitment that would require an estimated $3.6 trillion.
Identifying everyday opportunities to optimize your manufacturing processes will help to defray the high cost of an infrastructure overhaul. One diverse application offering many cost and production benefits is roll forming. This metal forming application is a suitable alternative to stamping, extruding, and press brake bending, especially for longer applications with higher volumes.
Roll forming can process pieces up to 80’ long and 27” wide in high quantities. The tooling is less expensive than stamping and can manipulate a wide variety of thick, high-strength stock materials into standard or complex geometries; it is the only process capable of bending a curve in three different directions within the same operation.
In addition to the money saved on tooling costs, roll forming can consolidate secondary operations into one process, saving additional money that would normally be spent on outsourcing these services. The production and cost savings potential of roll forming make it the ideal solution for manufacturing a vast range of large-scale infrastructure components such as bridge deck sections, guardrails, signs, and more.
Cargowall Ltd. has over 20 years of experience manufacturing a broad range of durable signage and fencing products including two-piece assemblies, delineators, mini-posts, fence posts, and highway guardrails. We offer roll forming services, as well as a host of secondary and finishing services like stamping and welding.
Cargowall Ltd. is committed to providing our customers project assistance from design inception to completion. To learn more about roll forming and how it will help American industries renew the nation’s infrastructure, we invite you to download our free eBook, “How to Make Roll Forming Your Cost-Effective Parts Manufacturing Process.”