
As welding staff in Northern Oil Tool increasingly struggled to keep up with customer orders, Norm Briggs, the company’s quality manager, recognized a possible bottleneck and began to search for answers.
Briggs identified that the company’s older stick welding equipment needed replacing, and that a cold metal transfer (CMT) system — a new form of welding that uses extremely low heat and an exceptionally stable arc to weld different materials efficiently — was an ideal solution.
InnoTech Alberta’s Alberta Manufacturing and Fabrication Innovation (AMFI) Program offered the technical expertise and advice required to implement the new system. An equipment demonstration arranged by AMFI and vendor Fronius Canada, showed CMT could cut welding time from 6.5 hours to just an hour and 45 minutes to produce the same part.