As a fabricator and owner of Colonial Iron Works, he recognized that professional shop drawings were key to winning higher-end projects and that increasing his shop’s fabrication accuracy was essential to staying in business. Drafting by hand was not his strong suit, so he began using CAD software and saw the potential for it to be a true game changer for the industry.
As a proud and active member of the NOMMA community, Dave believed in the power of true collaboration in the industry. He began sharing what he’d learned with fellow fabricators who were intrigued by it. Intrigued … but skeptical. “Most fabricators don’t consider themselves ‘computer guys.’ We knew we had to make it as simple to use as possible and so powerful you could hardly believe it.”
And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing since 1990. Since then, FabCAD has released 22 new versions of the program, focused on increasing automatic customization and building a design library from 1,200 parts to 16,000 castings, forgings, from 10 industry suppliers.
In the mid 90’s (and well ahead of its time), FABCAD developed AutoRail – pioneering automation in CAD software. The AutoRail program enabled those with no CAD experience to immediately create stair rails, entrance gates and fences by entering the dimensions and build components. What used to take hours of painstaking manual labor and calculations was being generated within seconds. AutoRail made it as simple as choosing a saved style name, entering the length or angle of the object and clicking “draw,” which generated an instantaneous model, complete with dimensions and a bill of materials.
Over the last three decades, FABCAD has remained dedicated to being a game changer for fabricators. “A big part of that is helping customers understand FABCAD is much more than a drawing program. It’s a productivity tool, a selling tool, a training tool, quality assurance tool, and a profitability tool.” FABCAD continues to push out new features and regular updates to better serve our customers. Dave offers 1:1 training and consulting, and teaches seminars such as “Where’s The Cash?”
