Work progressing on new Speed Fabrication facility

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Work continues on the new location for Speed Fabrication, south of Perryville on U.S. Highway 61.
Right now, the business, which began by owner Jared Cochran in 2018, operates from his home.
“We work out of our home shop,” Cochran said. “This started as a hobby. When we originally started this, it was just me and my wife doing it as a hobby
Four years ago he went full-time and the business has continued to grow.
“Now we’re a global company we ship and sell worldwide,” Cochran said. “We have dealers in other countries for some of our products. We produce products for other manufacturers for parts of their assemblies. We deal in medical, automotive, aircraft, heavy industry construction, that kind of stuff, mining, are some of our products.”
They also produce material for advertising billboards.
The expansion has been in the planning stages for several months.
“We started on this project two years ago, building a new manufacturing facility where we had room we had growth potential to be able to expand the business even more, into more lines of products,” he said.
Cochran searched for flat ground that had highway frontage and three phase power in Perry County for three years.
Industrial strength, high-voltage was a necessity, according to Cochran.
“We need that to run our equipment, our future equipment,” Cochran said. “We can’t run it on the household power.
When the property became available, Cochran partnered with an individual in obtaining property on the east side of Highway 61, across from MFA.
“It’s a prefab building, but because of the size everything is a little different in construction,” Cochran said. “It took 20 weeks to get the building manufactured and delivered.”
The end of August is the projected date for moving in and being up and running at the new location.

A few tasks that still need completed include office construction, pneumatic piping and electrical work.
The production machines will be housed in the middle portion of the building while all of the fabrication equipment will be over in the front portion of the building, including steel racks for steel sales, retail sales, steel storage
The rear portion of the building will be used for office space and a showroom area.
Cochran is looking forward to working in the newer, larger structure.
“The process flow will be faster because it’s a straight line,” Cochran said. “The material coming in, as the material goes out is all straight line from one building to the other. Shipping is going to be easier for us with truck freight shipping and deliveries to us from raw materials. We’ll be able to store more materials and house compared to what we do now because we have the area for it, which will curtail any market fluctuations that we’ve run into in the past.”
Cochran explained his business vision.
“The company has product lines that it manufactures and sells which includes custom designed signs, metal signs, business signs,” he said. “The business also produces its power tool organization systems for cordless tools to organize and and store your cordless tools. We ship them worldwide. We ship both our sign products and our tool organization system worldwide.”
Cochran continues to be amazed by the change in the past four years.
“It’s crazy to see the change,” he said. “It’s crazy to imagine taking this from a very minimal hobby, to growing into a full time process where we’re dealing globally, this gives us extra capabilities to bring on more and more work and release more products.

INCREASED WORKFORCE
Increasing the production will likely lead to an increased work force in the near future.
“We will bring them on as we grow,” Cochran said. “So it’s normally what we do is as we grow a product line, we’ll bring on one to two people to help cover that line. We’re heavy in automation so we will have a couple of robots in place in the future to run some of the products that are just a standard run of the mill product and our toolholder line will be robotically operated in some parts of it.”
If a customer needs a specialized product, Cochran will work to fill the need.
“We’re more of a manufacturing fabricator than anything else,” Cochran said. “Most of our products, if they’re fabricated, we fabricate them as a manufacturing side.