The Custom Industrial Ductwork Fabrication Process

Custom industrial ductwork is typically used to convey air or gas carrying particulate through an industrial facility. Often, this fluid travels through the ductwork at high temperatures. Applications include dust collection, HVAC, and fume extraction in facilities such as feed mills, sand plants, and steel mills.

With such intense general circumstances, plus all sorts of industry-specific regulations that come into play when designing duct systems in industrial plants, it’s no wonder that most industrial ductwork is custom designed and custom fabricated.

Finding the right custom metal fabricator to manufacturer your industrial ductwork is an important decision. You’ll want a company that instantly understands your engineering drawings, can help anticipate any issues that may arise during the fabrication process, and can expedite production thanks to its experience with the type of product.

At Southern Metal Fabricators, we’ve produced tens of thousands of linear feet of custom industrial ductwork, including all the general variations in materials (e.g., aluminum, carbon steel, galvanized, stainless), shapes (round, rectangular), and applications (e.g., flue gas ductwork, sand plant ductwork).

Here’s a presentation we created to show how we approach the process, which we thought might be useful for contractors and industrial facility managers looking to source custom industrial ductwork.

In essence, we follow a six-step process:

1. Evaluate a customer’s design or assist in creating a viable design that meets a customer’s application requirements.
2. If design work is required, provide design drawings for customer review prior to fabrication. Alternatively, produce shop drawings from customer’s design drawings and present shop drawings for approval.
3. Once drawings are approved, confirm the production schedule.
4. Release shop drawings to determine the following production requirements for fit-up, weld-out, and finishing.
5. Administer in-process quality control (QC) inspections to ensure that design requirements, industry standards, and quality expectations are met and maintained.
6. Conduct final QC inspections and prepare for shipment.

No doubt your industrial ductwork project has its specifics, otherwise it wouldn’t be “custom.” But we hope this outline of our process will give your some guidelines to follow.

For more information about how the custom industrial ductwork fabrication process works, or to talk specifically about your duct project, please contact us or call 1.888.421.9661. We’ll be happy to discuss your industrial ductwork needs and feel confident that we’ll be able to help!