Quoting a steel gate from its size, welding hours and scrap included
A gate priced on site from experience often hides the welding time and the steel left on the floor. Quoting a steel gate from its parts counts both.
The customer shows the opening. The owner of the workshop takes two measurements, looks at the pattern the customer likes and gives a figure. Quoting a steel gate is most often done this way, on site, and experience makes the figure close most of the time. It drifts when the gate is wider than usual, when the bars are closer together, or when the steel bought last month cost more than the steel the price was based on. The welding hours are almost always the part that was underestimated.
A gate is easy to describe as parts. The frame is square tube: two rails across each leaf and two stiles at the height. The infill is flat bar, and the number of bars follows from the width of each leaf and the spacing the customer wants. Welding time grows with the number of bars. Painting covers the tube and the flat bar, each with its own surface per metre. Write these rules once, and any opening can be priced from them.
One gate from its size to the cut list
Take a gate of 3000 × 1600 mm in two leaves, with bars every 120 mm. Each leaf is 1500 mm wide, which gives 12 bars per leaf, so 24 flat bars, each 1520 mm long once the frame is taken off the height. The frame needs 12.4 m of square tube. With a base time and a share per bar, the welding comes to 4.88 hours. These figures are what the gate is priced from, and they are also what the workshop will cut and weld.
The cut list follows directly. Tube and flat bar come in 6 m lengths, so the rails, stiles and infill bars are placed on bars with the width of the saw cut between them. What is left at the end of a bar is either long enough to keep, and goes back to stock as a numbered piece with its length, or it is scrap. Scrap is worth tracking too. Recorded by weight in its own stock item, it can be sold or returned.
The price of steel moves, so a quote should say how long it holds. Fifteen days is a common choice in the trade, and once it is written on the quote nobody has to argue about it later. Where steel is sold by weight, such as sheet, the material carries a price per kilo that the workshop updates when the market changes, and new quotes follow it.
Welding hours go into the pay
On the floor, the work order follows the gate: cutting, welding, grinding, painting and installation. Welding is often done by a welder paid by the hour. When the welder closes the step on the phone with the time spent, the hours count towards the monthly pay. The workshop then knows how long each gate took to weld, and can adjust its own rule for the next quote.
Not every job is a gate. Covers, guards and brackets are made from sheet cut to size and folded. The same approach works for them, with the sheet area, the number of folds and the material by weight.
sahmrev Workshop works this way for ironwork and steel fabrication. It includes everything in sahmrev Commerce and adds the workshop work. The ironwork page shows the gate template and its numbers, and the live demo lets you try a workshop end to end.