When Metalforms' new plasma table hit the burner area floor, Ruben [last name] didn't wait for anyone to tell him what it could do. He got the pass-plate formula from the fitters, his own father among them, taught himself CAD with an AI assistant on his phone, and turned a job that used to eat most of a day into one that's done in a few hours.
Finding a Better Way to Fabricate Pass Partition Plates
To understand why that matters, start with what he was working with before. The old plasma machine was, in Ruben's words, "basically a museum machine," so old that nobody built it anymore and maintenance parts were nearly impossible to find. When the shop needed a pass partition plate for a heat exchanger, the process looked like this: cut the plate square, hand a formula to the fitters, have them draw the shape on the plate by hand, cut it by hand, and then grind, and grind, and grind, until it finally fit the channel.
Ruben had been chasing a better way for years. He started at Metalforms as a fitter, then moved to the burner area when the shop needed coverage, a two-person area where he's now spent six years. On the old machine, programming anything meant going into the machine code and altering it line by line. It worked, but it was slow. What he really wanted was the ability to program parts properly, so the fitters wouldn't have to do so much by hand.
Then the new machine arrived, an Ultra plasma table that came with a laptop, LibreCAD, and ProNest nesting software. Most people would have learned the buttons and gone back to work. Ruben saw the opening he'd been waiting for.
Combining Shop-Floor Knowledge with New Technology
He taught himself LibreCAD from scratch. When he got stuck, he pulled out his phone and asked an AI assistant questions until he understood how the software worked. For the geometry itself, he went to the people who had been solving this problem by hand for decades: the fitters, one of whom is his own father. They gave him the formula they'd always used to lay out pass plates. Ruben took that shop-floor knowledge and built it into the computer, first testing on a thinner piece of plate to prove the concept, then programming the real thing.
The result: instead of a square blank that fitters had to shape by hand, the machine now cuts the pass partition plate to the exact roundness of the channel. A job that used to take the better part of a day is done in a fraction of the time, and the part fits.
He didn't stop there. When plates come off the table, they need traceability numbers, job and heat numbers that had always been hammer-stamped by hand, letter by letter. The machine could mark plates, but at full speed it only scratched the surface. Ruben researched the problem and found the fix: slow the machine to 50%, and the plasma has time to truly engrave the metal. Now the machine marks each plate in one pass, and the stamp folder stays in the drawer.
Continuing to Find New Ways to Improve
Ask Ruben what's next and the list gets long: pipe beveling with a turntable rig he's already tested, beveled holes in nozzel pads and shell heads, the rolling machine he recently started learning, and Inventor, the 3D modeling software the engineers use, so he can take a shell layout from model to machine himself.
Why has he stayed at Metalforms? The work itself. He grew up wanting to build with his hands, and he holds a welding stamp on top of everything else. And the way the company treats its people: when something happens in your family, Metalforms gives you the time to take care of it.
Sometimes the biggest process improvement in the shop doesn't come from a consultant or a corporate initiative. It comes from an operator with an idea, a formula from his dad, and the drive to teach himself something new.