Fabrication

Custom Fabrication, Built In-House

Fabrication is what sets ML Ruberton apart. While our guiderail, bridge railing, and fencing work is shared with our sister brands, ML Ruberton is the only company in the RoadGuard family with its own in-house fabrication shop.

That means custom rail production, weldments, and safety structures don’t depend on an outside supplier’s schedule — and repair work on existing structures can be fabricated to match, fast. When a field crew needs a replacement bracket, a non-standard rail splice, or a custom gate that isn’t sitting on a shelf anywhere, our shop builds it, rather than routing the request through a separate vendor’s order queue and waiting on their production timeline.

Fabrication touches nearly every service line we run. Guiderail, bridge railing, and highway signage projects all use fabricated steel components — brackets, splices, structural connections, and custom hardware — and our fencing and railings, stairs & gates work depends on the shop for everything from standard gate frames to fully custom ornamental fencing components. Keeping that capability in-house means the same company designing a solution for a site is the one building it.

How Our Shop Works

A fabrication job typically starts with a field need — a set of drawings for a new structure, a damaged component that needs an in-kind replacement, or a non-standard condition a standard catalog part doesn’t address. Our shop works from drawings, field measurements, or a damaged sample part to determine exactly what needs to be cut, formed, and welded, and orders the raw steel or aluminum stock the job calls for.

From there, the work moves through cutting and forming, welding and fitting, and a finish or coating step appropriate to where the component is going — a piece destined for a highway shoulder gets a different finish treatment than an ornamental gate for a corporate campus entrance. Finished components are staged and delivered to coordinate directly with the field crew’s installation schedule, rather than sitting in a separate logistics chain.

Because the shop and the field crews are part of the same company, a change in the field — a measurement that doesn’t quite match the original drawing, or a damaged part that turns out to need a slightly different repair than first thought — can be resolved with a phone call rather than a change order routed through an outside vendor.

Typical Output

Day to day, our shop produces the parts that make the rest of the company’s work possible — custom guiderail splices and connection hardware, bridge rail brackets and anchorage components, structural pieces for highway sign supports, and gate frames, handrails, and ornamental fencing components across our full fencing catalog. Some of that output is production runs for a specific project; some of it is a single custom piece to solve a one-off site condition.

Repair work makes up a steady share of the shop’s output as well. Matching a replacement component to an existing, weathered installation — a specific rail section, a timber rail component, a piece of ornamental fencing — takes the same fabrication skill as building something new, and it’s work our shop handles continuously alongside new-project fabrication.