Superior Steel Fabrication

Superior Steel Fabrication was established in 1993 as a family-owned contract metal-fabrication and precision-machining shop in Oregon, and has operated in that same character continuously since — a single 16,000-square-foot facility, ISO 9001 and AS9100 certified, running precision machining, sheet-metal fabrication, welding, plating, powder-coating, and assembly under one roof for a book of Western-United-States contract-manufacturing customers. The AS9100 aerospace certification places the firm inside the qualification perimeter that aerospace customers need to specify a supplier; the ISO 9001 base and the family-operated character give the shop a scale and cadence that a much larger fabricator would not have on a project of the size and complexity Superior’s customers tend to bring.

The firm offers contract services across the full sequence of precision-metal fabrication: engineering-drawing review at the front end; CNC machining (milling and turning) on precision parts; sheet-metal fabrication (laser cutting, waterjet, punching, forming, welding) on enclosures and assemblies; assembly of multi-component sub-assemblies; and finishing operations including plating and powder-coating on the same conveyorised line as the fabrication. Materials include carbon and stainless steels, aluminium, and copper alloys. Batch sizes range from prototype and short-run through mid-volume production runs where the customer’s own operations do not carry the required combination of machining, fabrication, and finishing capabilities in-house.

What distinguishes Superior Steel Fabrication among Western-United-States contract manufacturers is the combination of the aerospace-grade certification base and the family-shop operating character. Aerospace-qualified sheet-metal fabricators tend to be larger firms whose operations run at higher throughput and lower flexibility; family-shop fabricators tend to lack the AS9100 certification perimeter their aerospace customers require. Superior sits at the intersection — small enough to run a single project on a single conveyorised line under one owner’s eye, certified enough to be specified into the aerospace and defence supply chains that require the certification, and old enough in the trade for its Oregon customers to have used the shop through more than three decades of Western-United-States contract-manufacturing cycles.