Five questions worth asking any fabricator before you sign a quote in greater Wellington, and what the answers actually tell you.
The cheapest quote is rarely the best value. The most expensive is often paying for things you do not need. The job is to find a fabricator who specifies sensibly, tells you the truth about your site, and is still answering the phone in five years.
There are a lot of good metalworkers in this region. The questions below are not a test to catch anyone out. They are the things that, in our experience, decide whether you are still happy with the job a decade from now.
Grade is the single biggest factor in how long metalwork lasts at the coast. What you are listening for is an answer specific to your site rather than a default. How close is the sea, is there a pool or chlorine nearby, which way does the weather come from. A fabricator who asks those questions before naming a grade is doing the part that actually matters. Our guide to 304 versus 316 stainless covers what sits behind that conversation.
Some workshops fabricate everything in house. Others send out the powder coating, the galvanising, or the install. Neither is wrong, and a great deal of excellent work is done by a small shop and a good coater who have been working together for years. What matters is that you know who is holding the torch, and who you call if something needs adjusting later.
Any barrier where a fall of a metre or more is possible has to meet NZBC F4, and your council may want a producer statement alongside it. Ask early who is producing that paperwork and at what point. Our guide to building consent for balustrades sets out what a council package usually contains.
A photograph taken on the day of install tells you very little. Two or three addresses you can drive past, where the job has had a few winters on it, tells you a great deal. Salt, wind and UV do their work quickly in this region, and a rail that still looks right after five years is the only reference that counts.
This is the question most people skip. Workmanship should be covered without argument. How a metal behaves in one particular coastal microclimate over twenty years is a different matter, and a straight answer will say so rather than promise the world.
We come to your site, quote with the grade and the material schedule written down, and do the fabrication ourselves in our Kāpiti Coast workshop. or on site. We install across greater Wellington, from Paraparaumu through to the Wairarapa. We will tell you when 304 is fine and when you need 316. That is the deal.
Our workmanship. Welds, fixings, tolerances, fit. If something we made fails because of the way we made it, we come back and put it right, and there is no argument about it.
What no fabricator can honestly guarantee is how a metal behaves in one specific coastal microclimate over twenty years. Correctly specified 316 can still tea stain or pit in the wrong combination of salt, chlorine and whatever else happens to be drifting through the air on a given site. We would rather tell you that up front than write you a promise neither of us can rely on.
What matters more than the certificate is what happens when something does go wrong. We have gone back to jobs that were not ours to sort out, and we would rather find out why a rail corroded than argue about whose fault it was. Ask any fabricator you are considering what they did the last time a job did not behave. The answer will tell you more than a warranty document will.
Talk to The Fabricator if that sounds like the kind of working relationship you want. Start with our metalwork services.
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