Some visitors to the Salvagnini America open house on June 23 in Hamilton, Ohio, take advantage of the lunch break to spend some extra time speaking with the company’s equipment experts.

An open house to celebrate an expansion that’s been open for close to two years is something that only would happen coming out of a pandemic, but that’s where Salvagnini America found itself on June 23, welcoming more than 150 fabricators, company partners, and local dignitaries to view its new addition to its Hamilton, Ohio, building.

The 30,000-sq.-ft. expansion was completed in 2020, and metal fabricating customers have been visiting regularly since then, according to Matt Klopfenstein, Salvagnini’s vice president of sales and marketing. The late June open house was an opportunity to welcome guests in a much larger setting and introduce them to the company’s latest metal fabricating equipment and software, while also enjoying barbecue and music.

“I have personally witnessed growth at Salvagnini America since I joined the company in 1998,” said Doug Johnson, the company’s CEO. “We are a quiet company, not boisterous by nature.”

The new “campus,” as Johnson referred to the company’s new addition, is patterned after buildings at Salvagnini’s headquarters in Sarego, Italy, with heavy timber framing and cross-laminated timber wall and roof panels. Even the exposed concrete has a wood-like pattern stamped into it.

The larger exhibition area for the company’s equipment freed up room in the company’s warehouse, which has allowed the service and parts department to expand. CNC machining centers have been added as well to bolster Salvagnini’s tool production for its machines.

Open house attendees were able to see the company’s new S1 punch/shear machine and its multipress head, which has different types of thick turret tools in the same head. With this setup, the machine doesn’t have to stop for a tool change when moving between jobs calling for B, C, and D thick turret tool types.

In addition, attendees got to see the L3 laser cutting machine working in tandem with a material storage tower and a parts sorting system, the P2 panel bender, the B3 press brake with automatic tool changer, and a full production line comprised of the S4 punch/shear combination machine and a P4 panel bender.

Part of the expansion included the addition of several conference rooms and training areas. In the company’s Guido Salvagnini room, named after the company’s founder, visitors got an overview of the company’s software: Stream, the CAD/CAM software; Face, the human machine interface; OPS, the order processing system that connects the ERP software to programming software and machines; and Links, the company’s IoT offering.

“Factories today are like organisms, with the head, the hands, and the feet,” said Giovanni Piccolo, Salvagnini’s vice president of project management. “The software gives us the opportunity to keep track of all that’s going on in the factory.”

This was clearly evident in the digital connection between the tutorial being given in the training room to the S4 and P4 production line in the exhibition area. Salvagnini has about 1,600 machine installations in the U.S., and more metal fabricators will be looking to replicate this type of digital connectivity in their own shops. Now they’ll have a state-of-the-art facility to receive that training.

See More by Dan Davis

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The FABRICATOR, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating and forming magazine, and its sister publications, STAMPING Journal, The Tube & Pipe Journal, and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.

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