Above: Davi’s hydraulic MCB V-30 four-roll plate roll employs bottom roll clamps, and side rolls powered by planetary guides to provide bending force that delivers the tightest diameters on the market.

February 2023- Custom plate roll technology allows pipe builder to roll and weld thick plate.

Kelly Bise will be the first to tell you that he loves horsepower, building fast cars and breaking records. He holds the record for the world’s fastest Camaro at The Texas Mile, an annual event where participants test their fastest standing 1-mile speeds in a variety of street-legal vehicles. The president and second-generation owner of Bise Welding & Fabricating Inc. also built a reputation as the fastest pipe builder for industries that include oil and gas, utilities, construction, and water and drainage.

Milestone projects like repair work for New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have helped to cement Houston-based Bise Welding & Fabricating as the go-to company for rolled and welded pipe.

“I got a call from a member of the Army Corps of Engineers who said, ‘We heard you are the fastest pipe builder,’” Bise recalls. “The city’s 48-in. drainage pipe wasn’t big enough to push floodwaters out to the Mississippi. They needed 9-ft .-diameter pipe, 1 3/8 in. thick [wall] with a mitered elbow. And they needed it fast. They sent 100 truckloads of flat steel to my facility and for the next nine months, we worked around the clock six days a week to roll, weld and ship approximately 10 million lbs. of pipe.”

CAPABILITIES

This year, the company marks another milestone its 40th anniversary. Bise recalls how the company got its start. “In 1982, I was dividing my time between work, cars and college studies in music composition,” he says. “Then I got laid off from my job and my dad said, ‘let’s pool our money together and get into rolling and welding pipe.’ So we started the company in 1983 with $50,000, some welding equipment, a small rolling machine, and a crane. In 2000, I wanted to grow the company. We doubled our annual sales for the next five years. Eight to 10 employees grew to a workforce of 100.”

     Bise Welding & Fabricating uses the Davi MCB four-roll plate rolling machine to process 10-ft.-long plate up to 4½ -in. thick, and can create forms such as this 50-ton pressure vessel, top.

The operations are now housed in a 70,000-sq.-ft . facility on 12 acres. In addition to producing rolled and welded pipe, services include making horizontal and vertical casing, pilings, caissons, mono-piles, mitered fi tt ings, cylinders, cones and flame cutting. Bise Welding & Fabricating designs and engineers products to quality standards ASME Sec. VIII for boiler and pressure vessels, AWWA C200 for steel water pipe, AWS D1.1 for structural welding, API 2 B and API 5 L for seamless welded pipe, and vessel fabrication.

     Operating the Davi MCB plate roll is like driving a red Lamborghini. Kelly Bise, Bise Welding & Fabricating Inc.

Seven mechanical plate rolling machines allowed Bise Welding & Fabricating to process orders promptly from titanium, aluminum and clad material as well as carbon steel. “Plate comes in 10-ft. lengths,” Bise says. “In pipe, everything revolves around that measurement. When we roll a single length of plate, we call it a cylinder or can. Jobs that exceed 10 ft . we classify as pipe. We can make pipe any length. We just have to roll and weld it in 10-ft . increments. The largest job we’ve done was a 16-ft . diameter, 40,000-lb. pipe for a major electric and gas utility. Once the pipe was loaded on a specialized tractor-trailer, it gained another 2 ft . in height. It took riggers an hour and a half just to move the load off my street because trucks outfitted with telescoping buckets had to raise the electrical wires to allow the truck and trailer to pass.”

While Bise Welding & Fabricating is not limited to the length of pipe it can provide, the company was restricted when it came to plate thicknesses. It had the capacity to roll and weld plate up to 2 ¾ in. thick. Interest in processing thicker plate prompted the company to consider new equipment.

“We know how to pull apart and rebuild our legacy equipment, but technology has advanced significantly,” says Bise.

HEAVY LIFTING

Davi Inc.’s hydraulic MCB V-30 four-roll plate roll caught Bise’s attention. Davi manufactures plate and angle rolls, high-productivity lines and custom rolling machines. In addition to a large dealer network in the U.S. and Canada, the equipment builder has several warehouses in North America that stock machines ready for immediate delivery. It also has a sales, service and technical center in Dallas.

In 2019, Bise submitted custom specifications for the machine’s design/build. He traveled to Davi’s headquarters in Italy to see it demonstrated.

“We had to install a 50-ft. by 60-ft. foundation and purchase a 30-ton overhead crane,” he says. “It took 15 truckloads to deliver the components to our facility for assembly.” The Davi MCB four-roll plate roll was installed in 2020, giving Bise Welding & Fabrication the capability to roll 10-ft. plate up to 4 ½ in. thick. Bottom roll clamps guarantee perfect control over its position during forming. Side rolls, operated by Davi’s planetary guides, provide bending force able to deliver the tightest diameters per capacity on the market. The machine’s patented Servo-Tronic system provides perfect parallelism which supports accuracy. A compact, rigid closed frame effectively resists stresses generated during forming, while minimizing deflection and displacement for improved accuracy. A CNC control makes data input easy. Technicians from Davi’s headquarters can also access the machine remotely for troubleshooting.

Recently, Bise Welding & Fabricating used the MCB four-roll plate rolling machine to produce pipe 7 ft. in diameter and 3 in. thick for a nuclear containment application. “We produced 80 units out of A36 steel and expect to receive an order for 20 more,” Bise says. “I couldn’t have done this job without the Davi MCB plate roll. The machine has brought us a lot of work.”

Bise Welding & Fabricating processes approximately 2.5 million lbs. of pipe per month. The company’s goal is to build business for thicker plate to about 35 percent of its workload. “My operators all want to run the Davi plate roll,” says Bise. “Compared to our mechanical legacy equipment, which is a bit like rolling plate with a muscle car, operating the Davi MCB plate roll is like driving a red Lamborghini.”

Bise Welding & Fabricating Inc., 713/681-0958, http://bisewelding.com/

Davi Inc., 888/282-3284, http://davi.com/