Jamieson Welding – A hidden gem for Hardox® Wearparts

Close to the island of Ailsa Craig, famous for its granite which is used to produce the Olympic curling stones, Jamieson Welding is a gold medal finalist in terms of its wearparts experience across South West Scotland and beyond. HUB-4 took a trip to Jamieson Welding in Girvan, Ayrshire, Scotland to take a look at what makes them so special, and why SSAB have appointed them as their latest Hardox® Wearparts Centre in the UK.

One of their key strengths is that they are a highly-tuned family business with each member playing a pivotal part in the development of new ideas and processes. The team comprises four members, Allan Jamieson, Managing Director, Nanette Jamieson, Business Development Manager, Allyson Jamieson, Operations Manager and Elaine Jamieson, Finance Director. Their wearparts experience comes from nearly 40years of supplying the demanding scallop fishing industry where the parts are tested against the fiercest of elements, the Scottish open cast mining and quarrying industry, where wearparts are critical in ensuring a smooth operation is maintained, and more recently the renewables sector where parts must be produced at extremely high quality for long-term continual use in the UK’s windfarms.

We talked with Allan Jamieson, Managing Director who gave us a full tour of the facility “We are very excited about joining the Hardox® Wearparts Centre Network within the UK and look forward to working as part of the team. We have had a long-standing partnership with SSAB for over 30 years now and have been using Hardox across various industries where it’s been very successful for us. We’ve recently invested £4 million in expanding our state of the art facility here which includes a 300tonne 3m press break, automatic shot-blasting, powder coating, profile burning heads, plasma cutting, high quality laser cutting, highly desirable waterjet cutting and extremely efficient robotic welding. In all, a full fabrication facility.”

“On our first machine we have two profile burning heads and one plasma on a 5m x 2.5m bed and are able to cut material up to 200mm thick with the profile burning heads. The plasma head has a 200amp plasma power source and can cut up to 20mm thick. But because we wanted to supply higher quality profiles without any flame effected areas to our clients, we installed the two waterjet cutting systems, which are continually upgraded every two years. This allows us to handle 4m by 2m wide material and cut profiles of up to 150mm in thickness.

Both these machines have a dynamic tilting head meaning that we always accomplish a straight edge cut of exactly 90Ëš. This means that the materials properties are unaffected, and it can proceed straight through to welding. Because of the waterjets versatility we can even accomplish very small 2mm tapping holes through 150mm material with no heat effected zones at all. These machines allow us to offer our clients profiles of any shape with holes of any size without effecting the quality of the Hardox wearparts and offer a full certificate for the plate without having to retest.”

Following Allan through the facility he pointed out “Here we have our laser cutting machine, it’s a 3m wide bed with a 3KW laser allowing us to cut material up to 20mm in thickness. Again, with the laser we also accomplish an accurate straight edge cut of exactly 90Ëš. The laser also allows us to productively cut many different material types. With the combination of the waterjet and laser cutting facilities we offer a new Hardox® Wearparts Centre that can handle Hardox 400, 500 and 600 material grades, full profiling, cutting, welding, and fast turnaround of wearparts back to our clients with no heat effected areas at all, meaning that no quality is lost in the materials hardness, as these processes cut down additional work to the wear plate.”

Nanette Jamieson, Business Development Manager joined us to talk about the robotic welding process that they have invested in “Quite early on, we identified an opportunity in the robotic welding market across the UK to be able to supply our clients with a consistent high quality of welding and we now have five robotic welding machines which can handle any amount of welding that we give them. We have 3D modelling software which we use to create each bespoke programming job for the robots and each station can fully manipulate the fabrications to be welded synchronising with the robot.

These stations can handle up to ¾ tonnes in weight, and we can operate all the robots at once if required, and five robots working 24/7 for a week would equate to around 180 human welders working that same period. Another big benefit of robotic welding is that all our robots meet the requirements of all international coding standards including ISO, AWS, ASMI, and NORSOK, meaning that we can offer fully coded welding giving identical consistent welds, plus we can vary our skill set acordingly.”

Allyson Jamieson, Operations Manager told us a little more about Hardox® “We carry around 300tonne of steel mostly comprising of Domex® & Hardox® at any one time here in Girvan and it’s all stored in this bespoke storage facility which is fully temperature controlled using a biomass boiler. This keeps the material in a brand-new state, at a constant optimum temperature where is doesn’t condensate, so its preserved perfectly. We work very closely with SSAB in terms of product development and training to make sure that we are always at the cutting edge of Hardox® technology and are looking forward very much to driving the business forward as a brand new Hardox® Wearparts Centre. Both Allan and I are fully qualified welders meeting all the required welding industry standards which is a huge benefit when programming the robots and understanding the overall welding process around Hardox® wearplate. We know that we have the experience here to be able to deliver the high quality of product required by SSAB every time to all of our clients.”

For more information on Jamieson Welding please visit www.jamiesonwelding.com or call +44 (01465) 713790 and to learn more about Hardox® please visit www.hardoxwearparts.com