Fast FAB

One big part of Life on Fast Road the last few months has been Tony's thriving welding business, Fast FAB.  In October, Tony decided to build a couple of hopper bottoms for grain bins and see if there was enough interest in them to go into production.  He hauled one of them to Glasgow Implement in Glasgow, MT, to display,  put up advertising fliers in a couple of local towns, put an ad in a local paper, and his phone hasn't stopped ringing since.  He now has 2 full time employees helping him build the hoppers.

The hoppers are built upside down, and start out as flat sheets of metal, welded together with a hole in the middle, and a triangle cut out to the edge.  Then its lifted up which forms the cone shape. The cone is then set on a jig that holds the ring that the grain bin is bolted to. 

Cutting the iron for the legs.

The legs and bottom skid go on, then they are flipped right side up.

the flipping process

the next step is to finish welding and painting.

 

a few of the finished product

In case you're wondering, "OK, so what do you do with these things?"  here is a picture of some of our previous hopper bottoms under gain bins.  The hoppers do a couple of things.  They increase the number of bushels stored in each bin, and best of all, they pretty much eliminate the need to get inside the bin to shovel and sweep out the grain by hand!