Above: To build skids for a data center and bring fabrication in house, Barnes Welding paired Hypertherm’s Powermax SNYC plasma cutting system with a Vectis cobot to automate a manual job.
April, 2026- The dryland wheat industry nurtures grain in semi-arid regions like Washington, the nation’s third largest producer. With no irrigation, crops rely on stored soil moisture and less than 11 inches of annual rainfall. It is a high-risk, high-resilience agricultural market that also depends on equipment designed for moisture conservation and high-residue management. Metal fabrication and repair shop Barnes Welding Inc. blends engineering expertise and advanced technology with old-fashioned know-how to provide this and other markets with agricultural repairs and structural steel fabrication.
The company was founded by Waterville, Washington, native Weldon Barnes, who grew up on a dryland wheat farm and had a penchant for fixing things.
“My grandfather was also a crop duster and helped to build the runway for the airport” next to the shop, says General Manager Josh Barnes, who is the third-generation shop owner and fourth-generation wheat farmer in a community of 1,300 residents. His father, David Barnes, still helps to run the company while his mother, Kathleen, is the bookkeeper. Josh Barnes credits his father with encouraging him to pursue lean manufacturing practices and look at ways to continually improve work processes and part quality.
Data centers are a huge growth market for fabricators.
NEW MARKET
“We are a diverse team of talented individuals that are contributing to a legacy that started more than 50 years ago,” Josh Barnes says.
The shop’s skills in welding, CNC plasma cutting and CAD design and machining are driving healthy growth. In 2025, it won a bid to build skids for a data center, a decision that led the fabricator to automate the job with a Hypertherm Powermax SYNC series plasma cutter paired with a flexible collaborative robot arm.
The project called for the skids to be made from W4 wide-flange I-beams 4 feet by 23 feet long or 5 feet by 22 feet long with a ¼-inch thick carbon steel top. The skids served as a structural foundation for equipment such as power distribution units, cooling systems, generators and heat exchangers.
Barnes Welding manually cut the top and bottom flanges of each beam, beveled the ends and created a tag for insertion inside the component to prepare for welding.
“You are essentially cutting one I-beam to fit inside another I-beam,” says Barnes. “The job required us to make multiple cuts that had to be just right. It was about a 22-minute process with varying degrees of quality.”
The challenges of performing the tasks by hand prompted Barnes Welding to seek ways to automate. A long-time Hypertherm customer, the fabricator contacted its distributor Norco Inc., which sells Vectis cobot cutting tools designed to work with Hypertherm plasma cutters. Norco integrated Vectis cobot with Hypertherm’s Powermax SYNC plasma cutting system to give Barnes Welding the ability to perform precise, automated cutting of 3D shapes, tubes and flat parts.
“It was a game changer,” says Barnes. “We brought our processing time down to about 1 minute. Part quality improved dramatically, and it made the work safer for our personnel. We executed 3,500 copes. The skids were weld prepped, sandblasted, painted and bundled into packs of 16 each.”
Designed for fabricators that typically experience high-mix, low-volume work, the Powermax SYNC features built-in intelligence for automatic setup. SmartSYNC torches automatically set the correct amperage and air pressure. A single-piece, color-coded, RFID-enabled consumable cartridge eliminates the need for traditional multi-part, fivepiece torch setups for longer consumable life.
Once weld prepped, sandblasted and painted, skids are bundled into packs of 16 and delivered to the customer.
HIGH YIELD
“We have run Hypertherm equipment since the 1990s,” Barnes says. “We use their XPR plasma cutting table and portable plasma cutters from their Powermax line, as well. Hypertherm’s training on the cobot cutting system allowed us to use almost every feature offered by Vectis. We found that if an I-beam wasn’t straight, for example, we could adjust the cobot to the I-beam’s variance and maintain consistent bevels for repeatable welds.”
Barnes Welding learned that automating the job yielded an unexpected benefit. The cobot cutting system began reporting errors almost immediately. Despite placing the workpiece against a locating stop on the cutting tableto ensure each part was in the exact same position for each processing cycle the cobot arm was shooting above the part without actually cutting it.
“We discovered that the I-beam had tolerances that were outside of spec,” Barnes explains. “We found that the I-beams coming from the mill could be twisted and off spec by as much as inch. That’s a huge variance over 4 inches. Because the automated system helped us identify this defect right away, we were able to program the cobot to actually search the part and cut it where it was at.
“Once we were able to correct our orientation,” he says, that aided assembly and actually allowed us to cut our assembly time in half throughout the entire project. If we had continued performing those tasks manually, it would have taken us much longer to identify the problem.”
With the job successfully completed, Barnes Welding is ready to take on other work suitable for the cobot plasma cutter.
“A mentor in the industry recently told me, ‘Be grateful for problems. They are improvement opportunities.’”
Barnes Welding Inc., 509/745-8588, barnesweldinginc.com
Hypertherm, 603/643-3441, hypertherm.com
