Success Story: Sanitary Welding

A small business uses LightWELD to increase welding productivity while upholding mission-critical quality standards.

What’s a Success Story?

There are a lot of reasons why our customers invest in LightWELD: it might solve a specific problem for them, or help them be more productive, or they might just be excited by the technology. Whatever the reason, we love talking to them and learning about their businesses.

Our success stories are a closer look at some of our customers, what they’re working on, and how LightWELD has helped them find success. We hope that their stories can help give you a better idea of how the industry is using and benefiting from LightWELD.

If you would like to be featured in a LightWELD success story, we’d love to hear from you. Just click here to get started.

About the Company

Founded in 2020, Sanitary Welding is a small Michigan-based welding and fabrication company specializing in high-purity and sanitary piping, tubing, vessels, and stainless steel work. More specifically, the company’s success is built on deep experience in sanitary process piping, orbital welding, vessel fabrication, passivation, and contamination-sensitive systems.

That kind of experience simply doesn’t exist at your run-of-the-mill fab shop. The company serves industries where hygiene and equipment cleanliness is non-negotiable including pharmaceutical, food and beverage, dairy production, cosmetics, and water treatment.

The company was founded by Steve Feamster, who combines years of welding, fabrication, and automation experience with an entrepreneurial spirit, asserting he is “all in as an entrepreneur.” At the time of writing, Feamster has grown the company to 6 employees, but their small size hasn’t stopped them from securing work with big clients like Pepsi-Cola and General Motors.

Learn more about Sanitary Welding here.

The Challenge

Sanitary Welding has established themselves as a valuable solutions provider not by trying to be fabrication generalists, but by staying focused on their sanitary welding specialization.

That focus is critically important. In high-purity process systems, a weld is about more than just holding an assembly together. In this context, a good weld must not only look the part and hold up – it must also be clean and not create opportunities for future contamination.

Fortunately, creating clean, controlled welds is what Sanitary Welding does best, and Feamster and his team have the TIG welding experience to execute consistently. But, while having skilled welders in the shop eliminates one common barrier, it doesn’t address another challenge that is familiar to small fabricators: TIG welding can deliver the quality but not always the speed to keep up with incoming work.

The TIG welding speed issue is twofold. TIG’s travel speed is fairly slow, which can cause problems when a project’s welds are measured in feet rather than inches. The problem compounds when accounting for heat input – avoiding warping and distortion forces welders to slow down even further and take additional weld prep steps.

For Sanitary Welding, things become even more complicated on larger projects where repeatability is particularly important. While TIG welding can achieve consistent results, even a small chance of variability can compromise a big job’s turnaround time and profitability.

The Solution

Looking into laser

Feamster, drawing on his fabrication and automation background, quickly zeroed in on laser welding as a promising solution. Historically, automated laser welding has revolutionized production in industries with high quality standards like automotive and aerospace. The process has only become more accessible to small fabricators fairly recently.

According to Feamster, “I am always looking at our current capabilities and thinking about where they need to be.” When asked about how he plans to grow his company, the founder continued, “We need to stay ahead of the curve with our welding capabilities. And laser welding is the future.”

Despite his automation background, Feamster recognized that a manual machine was an easier place to start if he was going to integrate laser welding into his operation. It wasn’t long before he turned his attention to LightWELD. Conveniently, Sanitary Welding is located less than 10 minutes from IPG’s Novi location, making it easy for the team to try handheld laser welding in person.

After he was satisfied with his research and felt confident in the product, Feamster decided it was time to add a LightWELD machine to the shop floor. “For us it was a real investment. But I wanted only the best and was concerned about the quality of imported machines. Not to mention the lack of support.”

Getting up to speed

Laser welding is often considered roughly as easy to learn as MIG welding, although with reduced manual dexterity requirements. But that doesn’t mean that it’s plug and play for a team with no experience.

According to Feamster, dialing in parameters and understanding the process took a little bit of experimentation. “We started with just fusion welding and it was tricky. But once we added a wire feeder, things just took off.”

Sanitary Welding quickly saw improvements to both productivity and weld consistency. The company saw particularly impressive results when welding a cover to a large storage tank. Feamster described the project, saying, “We had to make a 20 foot weld just for one seam. With TIG it would have taken 2 hours. With LightWELD, it took ten minutes.”

Laser welding typically has a weld travel speed four or more times higher than TIG. But laser welding’s reduced heat input was also a factor in this application. “Normally, I would be really concerned about warping,” says Feamster, “But with the laser there is so little heat that we can go really fast.”

For most of Sanitary Welding’s projects, stainless steel is the material of choice and weld passivation is a major concern. Welds that are not passivated can rust, shedding unwanted particles into products that must be kept uncontaminated. They can also corrode and form cavities in which bacteria and other contaminants can propagate. According to Feamster, laser welds come out significantly cleaner, reducing the team’s time spent passivating. And that passivation can be done quickly with LightWELD’s laser cleaning feature.

Mastering a new tool

Feamster’s team isn’t afraid to innovate, either. On another recent project where Sanitary Welding was fabricating a copper distillery, the welders switched out their normal welding wire for copper, dialed in some custom settings, and used LightWELD to braze the parts together. Commenting on the project’s success, Feamster says, “The seams came out superb. It was fast and we barely had to do any finishing work.”

After the successful manual implementation, Sanitary Welding has also added a laser welding cobot equipped with a LightWELD machine to the shop floor. At the time of writing, the cobot accounts for about 20% of the company’s laser welding utilization, with the system already becoming instrumental for large scale projects that include many sub-assemblies.

According to Feamster, adding laser welding has been such a success that his company is changing the way they design to take even more advantage of the process. “We are embracing a design for laser welding philosophy, particularly for large projects.”

Looking forward

When asked about the future of his team and Sanitary Welding, Feamster mentioned that his operation had recently relocated to a larger facility in Farmington Hills, MI. This new facility will allow expansion into data center cooling infrastructure as well as advanced stainless process systems — applications where weld integrity is critical. To support this path, he plans to add more automation.

The founder also wants to make a difference in his community by developing programs for sanitary welding at trade schools. “My goal would be to give kids the kind of opportunities I had to learn a unique industry and maybe even bring them in as the next generation of apprentices.” Continuing, the founder added, “And laser would be part of that, of course.”

You can learn more about Sanitary Welding and their work on their website.

Getting Started with LightWELD

Sanitary Welding is just one of thousands of customers that have expanded their capabilities with LightWELD. But every operation is different. That’s why we’re here to help – whether you have questions about safety, what’s possible, or just want to try LightWELD before committing, we’re here to make getting started easy.

Click here to get started. We’ll take it from there.