What is fabrication ?

What is Fabrication ?

The definition of the word “Fabrication”, as per the Oxford Dictionary is “ to construct or manufacture an industrial equipment”. That is the simplest way to define fabrication for industry.

A fabrication engineer will put to use a variety of processes in his armoury to construct an equipment as desired by his customer. Even as the fabrication technology has developed considerably over past 2 decades, the basic processes involved in fabrication of equipment remain the same.

The core processes involved in fabrication are Gas Cutting, Plasma Cutting, Welding, Plate bending & rolling, Hot / Cold Forming, grinding, heat treatment, surface treatment & coating. This list is however only indicative. Each of these processes has many variants. Also this list is not exhaustive. There are a lot of support processes in fabrication which may not be termed as core processes though. It can be noted that there is huge element of human involvement in these processes. A workshop that carries out such processes will normally be termed a fabrication shop or fab shop for short. A fab shop will typically employ fitters (some times called fabricators), welders and grinders (small tool operators).

However, machining processes too are integral part of construction of equipments. In industry these processes are collectively termed as machining. It may include operations like turning, milling, drilling, tapping, thread whirling. Machines used may vary from simple lathes & ,milling machines to sophisticated CNC machines.

While customers will normally refer to their equipment manufacturer as fabricator, the manufacturer may have distinct shops for fabrication and machining.

Therefore hereon I will be refering manufacturer as fabricator, shop that builds an equipment by manual / semi-automatic processes mentioned above as fab shop and shop that carries out major machining operations as machine shop.

I will be discussing each of the core fabrication processes to the details that I have in my limited knowledge, in future posts.