If you attended FABTECH~R (Chicago, Nov. 14-17) and talked to just a handful of exhibitors about their impressions of the expo, you're well aware that 2012 just might turn out to be a good year to be a metal fab-ricator. The expo set two records, one for size and another for attendance-it covered more than 500,000 net sq. ft., and hosted more than 12,000 visitors on the first day. One exhibitor mentioned to me that Nov. 14 was his busiest day at any FABTECH in the last 12 years. Why did we have such a big and busy expo? Several reasons, probably. First, fabricators are busy these days. Many have equipment running nearly at full capacity, so they were shopping for additional machines. Industrial machines usually can't run much more than about 80 percent of the time; they need downtime for maintenance and repairs. The amount varies by manufacturer, but the magic number is somewhere between 78 and 82 percent uptime. Tracked by the Federal Reserve Board, capacity utilization in the metal fabrication industry has been higher than 78 percent since June.
展开▼
