Turn Up the Pressure

In business for over 50 years, Royal Welding & Fabricating (Fullerton, California) prides themselves on two basic tenets: “We specialize in stainless steel and aluminum welding, often with mirror finish, plus we can offer complete turnkey operation for the highly challenging jobs, with design, engineering, most component production, all assembly, welding, grinding, fine finish and full testing capability, all in-house,” explains Wallace Cook, their general manager. “That means customers can bring their jobs to us with complete confidence and know that they’ll get a quick response should any changes be required.” He also takes pride in having originated their slogan, “Where Quality is King.” This Los Angeles-area shop produces a wide assortment of tanks, mixers, chambers and extractors for myriad industrial, medical and commercial uses.  All of the welders here are ASME-certified and the shop conforms to all of the necessary standards for the aerospace, nuclear and other high precision markets.

Royal produces units to withstand extreme pressures, high vacuum processing and high and low temperatures for hazardous chemical extraction processing, providing customers with often unique, application-specific designs. For example, their dimpled plate designs are renowned for superior heat dissipation and cost savings as an alternative to partial or full metal jacket heat exchangers. The shop also fabricates a variety of custom tube and shell heat exchangers, centrifugal pump vessels, agitators, autoclaves, hydroclaves, high volume cooking kettles, high pressure tanks for reverse osmosis, extreme environment vessels and vacuum chambers to all applicable ASME, TEMA and 3A standards. The units produced here are in use for water conditioning on the space station.

A unique feature of Royal Welding engineering is their dimple jacketed stainless steel design for mixing tanks and reactors. The jackets on such tanks can be ASME code-stamped for high or low pressure service.  Dimple jackets can be supplied as individually shaped units to install on existing equipment in a retrofit operation or as an OEM component. “The dimple plate design is more efficient in promoting heat transfer through the tank wall because the dimples generate turbulence in the flow through the jacket,” explains Cook. “Because of the low profile, more insulation can be used in the same space.” (For more information, contact Royal Welding & Fabricating, 1000 East Elm Avenue, Fullerton, CA 92831, 714-680-6669, Fax: 714-680-6646, [email protected], www.royalwelding.com.)

Their customer list reads like a “who’s who” of American industry, ranging from leading pharmaceutical and food companies to others in the aerospace, oil/gas and chemical industries, plus government concerns.  The shop is becoming a leading supplier to emerging markets on the West Coast, including craft beers and even cannabis farming, for which Royal produces high precision CO2 extractors. The company’s director of engineering is Brad Card, who maintains a full library of every unique success they achieve. “We’ve done everything from fusion reactors for particle acceleration to cleaning reactors for laundering (the legal kind) money, gel reactors for vitamin supplements, paint formulation tanks, vacuum chambers for paralyne coatings, environmental chambers for silicon wafer tests, vessels for dark matter research and fuel tanks for rocket launch vehicles,” notes Card.

All of the work here begins in the design department, where the latest CAD technology produces designs for the various machine shop operations that are located in-house. These include metal bending, conventional chip-cutting machine tool work, forming and fabrication, final assembly and performance testing, plus a key area of this shop: the grinding and finishing department. Every weld and surface finishing job in this shop is done to the highest quality specifications and the abrasives used must match the materials, job requirements and appearance standards set by the customer and by Royal.

We are a key partner in the surface finishing operations at Royal, and our local representative is regional sales manager Gary Mergeanian, who has served their shop for over 25 years and brings more than 30 years of thorough knowledge of tool and abrasive technologies to their team. “Few customers present me with the daily challenges that I get from them, but these are the moments that make doing business so rewarding,” observes Mergeanian. “When I can bring a solution to the job at hand, whether it’s a special abrasive pad or a full power tool assembly, that’s exciting. Best of all, the satisfaction of the welding and finishing operator teams at Royal is my goal, and getting it is very important to me. To make the jobs easier and less fatiguing for these guys, while at the same time helping them produce the highest quality finish possible . . . that’s a challenge I welcome every day.”

One of the newer developments being used at Royal is the Roto family of products, where the motor drive, flex shaft and handheld adapter unit are integrated into a powerful and flexible tool package. Separating the weight of the motor and mechanical drive components from the hand tool, and incorporating highly flexible adapters into the handheld unit allows the operators much greater flexibility in performing their work. “Our operators have less fatigue and greater freedom of movement with these units, which allow long periods of work in tight spaces or inside large containment vessels,” comments Cook. “That’s a real plus for the guys in the shop. Gary is always bringing us new and better ways to grind welds and finish surfaces on stainless and aluminum.”

Belt and pad abrasive work can be done on the same tool using the Roto family. This further speeds the work in the shop at Royal, which recently built their own polishing machine setup for internal tank head polishing, using a variety of our components. “These tools are very good, easy to handle and the guys don’t get worn out,” says shop supervisor Ricardo Guerrero. “We can do faster finishing with less abrasive, and that means money saved.” Mergeanian adds that, “We’ve taken feedback from the operators here at Royal and made specific changes in the design and manufacture of our tools in response. Since these guys are also working with stainless, high performance aluminum alloys, heat-treated Inconel and other challenging materials, they’ve also provided valuable input for our abrasives engineering team.”