Keeping the world safe is a full-time job for Delta Scientific Corporation. When you produce barricade systems designed to stop a 50,000-lb. truck intent on killing people, product failure is not an option. As the world’s leading manufacturer of vehicle access control devices, Delta Scientific has had to dedicate itself to finding ways to fabricate high quality products quickly and efficiently to meet a growing need. That’s why Delta Scientific relies on ESAB products for its welding and cutting operations.

Delta Scientific produces 90% of the vehicle access control devices sold worldwide, including barrier walls, cable and hydraulic beam barriers, barricades that rise up out of the road when needed, high security bollard systems that raise and lower in seconds and can be designed to match the architecture of the building, and even portable barricades that can be installed in 15 minutes. Since the company started in 1974, “our products have gotten more sophisticated,” says president and founder Harry Dickinson. “They need to stop heavier and faster vehicles, and they need to be easy to maintain.” Major customers include the U.S Air Force, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and a host of foreign governments who use Delta Scientific’s products to protect dams, bridges, petrochemical plants, transportation hubs, embassies, palaces, universities and military facilities worldwide.           

“The War on Terrorism has increased our business six-fold,” adds Dickenson’s son, David Dickinson, senior vice president. In recent years, the company has expanded due both to the proliferation of products they offer and to the increase in world emergencies. They expanded their existing plants in Valencia, California, and Lorton, Virginia, and built a new plant in Palmdale, California, to ensure that they have the capacity to provide their products when they are needed. They also have a location in the UK.

“Our products are life-critical,” says David Dickinson. “If they fail, our customers could have a real tragedy on their hands. We have a great responsibility for quality.”

Dickinson attributes the company’s ability to meet demands in a timely fashion while maintaining very high quality standards to several factors. First, Delta Scientific prides itself on its engineering and design capabilities. The company considers itself the leader in the use of Dynamic Linear Analysis to design and test successful vehicle barricades. Their engineers have amassed an extensive database of full-scale test results and use sophisticated computer models that allow them to test new designs right at their desktops. This allows them to analyze unique situations and design products to meet special needs.

The real test of quality, however, must be met on the fabrication floor. When you need to hold together structures that can absorb 1.5 million ft-lbs of kinetic energy, “it all comes down to the weld,” according to David Dickinson. Through the years, Delta Scientific has used welding equipment from all the major welding vendors. When they built their Palmdale plant, however, they decided to standardize on a single vendor. They felt this would give them better inventory control, and the right vendor would provide the support they needed if they had a problem. They were also looking for a vendor that could supply welding expertise and work as a partner with them to produce a better quality product. “If we can go to a vendor, and they can do more for us than just deliver the product, then that makes a big difference,” Dickinson says.

The company ran a two-month test, letting their welders work with equipment from various vendors. At the same time, company management monitored the vendor’s training capabilities, support, delivery and weld quality. At the end of the two-month period, both the welders and management selected ESAB Welding & Cutting Products as their first choice.

For their main welding equipment, they chose Migmaster^® 250 welding machines. The Migmaster is an industrial quality MIG welding system with DC welding output from 30 to 280 amps, rated 250 amps at 50% duty cycle. Delta Scientific also purchased a number of hand-held Plasmarc^® and PowerCut^® 875 plasma arc cutters, oxyfuel torches and a large quantity of ESAB Dual Shield^® 7100 Ultra flux core wire. This versatile, all-position wire improved productivity with its high deposition rates and easy slag removal while maintaining the highest weld quality. Dual Shield 7100 offers typical yield strengths of 78,000 psi as welded with CO₂ and 85,000 psi as welded with a 75% argon/25% CO₂ mix.

The welders liked the arc and the weld quality they achieved with the Migmaster and Dual Shield wire. They say that the 7100 wire provided much better performance than the MIG wire they had used previously. “The welders also liked the ESAB machines,” says Production Supervisor Lloyd Harris. “They were more comfortable using them. And the support we get from ESAB is terrific.”

 “ESAB’s product service is excellent, and they were very pro-active in their training program,” David Dickinson adds. ESAB also gets very high marks on their ability to deliver the right product on time. The new plant in Palmdale has been successfully meeting the company’s standards for productivity and product quality, and Dickinson is happy to attribute part of that success to selecting the right vendor-partner to help in their endeavors.