Subcontract Manufacturing and Assembly Projects

Filly Fabricating hand-wraps insulation on a variety of busbars. The busbars are sourced from an on-site supplier, so one vendor fabricates the busbar, insulates it, and ships it complete. That removes a handoff, a second freight leg, and a second vendor to manage.

The work is hand-applied and repeatable. Wrap tension, overlap, and finish stay consistent from the first unit to the last, because the same team has been doing it for years.

This is ongoing work. It supports customers that need accurate, production-ready busbar components for electrical and power-related applications.

Filly Fabricating builds to ongoing purchase orders for:

• Electromechanical assemblies
• Subpanel assemblies
• Resistors
• Varistors
• Diodes

Filly Fabricating builds to the customer’s print and the customer’s quality standard. No redesign, no substitutions, no scope creep. Where a customer’s standard differs from Filly Fabricating’s internal process, the customer’s standard governs.

This is long-term, repeat work. The same assemblies get ordered again and again, which means the build is documented, the fixtures already exist, and a new order does not start from zero.

More than 800 stator units wound and brazed for rail transit applications, with zero defects across the program.

All material was free-issued and the contract was structured as labor only. The customer kept control of material cost and specification. Filly Fabricating supplied the hand skills. Winding and brazing are manual operations where consistency comes from the person doing the work, not the machine.

Units were built at Filly Fabricating’s North Versailles facility and returned to the customer for final motor assembly.

Filly Fabricating assembles electrical boxes for power distribution systems. These boxes are used in:

• Data centers
• Mission-critical facilities
• Retail environments
• Industrial facilities
• Higher education markets

Material was arriving weekly, and shipments were often short a component. Each gap meant a lost production day, and those days added up to weeks over the program.

Filly Fabricating proposed a straightforward change: send a month of material at a time instead of a week at a time. Filly Fabricating also offered to send its own team to help build the first kits so nothing was missed, and the two teams restructured how they communicated around the new schedule.

Downtime dropped to near-zero and deliveries stayed on schedule. Filly Fabricating went on to offer warehousing to replace the external storage the customer was renting.

Filly Fabricating purchased, warehoused, and kitted bus components for a customer working to meet DBE participation goals.

Inventory was spread across three external storage sites, and a crew of five to six people was spending more time finding parts than packing them.

Filly Fabricating started with a full audit of incoming material, then built a mobile racking and cataloging system that brought everything onto one site. Kits were packed in the order the assemblers needed them on the line, not in part-number order.

The kitting crew went from five or six people down to two, a labor reduction of more than half. External storage was eliminated. Both teams could see stock levels in the same tracking system.

Kits shipped directly from Filly Fabricating’s facility to the project site, where the customer’s technicians installed the components. The work covers more than assembly alone. The team also manages production support, staged materials, kitting, and project-site delivery.

The original build ran over 20 hours a unit and took five people, three of them holding the frame in position while the others worked.

Filly Fabricating built a rotisserie-style holding fixture so one person could rotate the unit, rewrote the assembly sequence, and redesigned the station so the work could be done seated.

Build time dropped to 13 hours. The three-person hold was gone. Across the program that came to roughly 4,000 labor hours a year back to the customer.

More than 500 units shipped with zero defects. Filly Fabricating worked on-site at the customer’s facility for part of the program.

Filly Fabricating also provided the following subassembly units in support of each inverter:

• Relay assemblies built with timer-sockets and surge absorbers
• Current transformer frames with additional insulators and busbars
• High-speed circuit breaker, charging, and discharge units

Additional subassemblies included:

• Heatsink assemblies with cooling grills attached to the frame
• IGBT transistor assemblies tested at high voltage
• Thermistor control harnesses
• Standoff insulators and frames with busbars attached
• Capacitor assemblies that store and release electrical charge
• Gate drive assembly units with PCB boards wired and attached
• Fan units