Allentown Metal Works is a job shop with multiple machining, fabricating, and assembly capabilities, including SMAW, FACAW, GMAW and SAW welding.

Allentown Metal Works may be a a sprawling complex with multiple capabilities, but its really a job shop. Workers may be processing a dozen or more orders at once in the shop. Last December, the President of the United States visited Allentown Metal Works, and saw a huge aluminum node block being machined for work in Cruise missile manufacturing. He commented that the workers “(work) hard … to forge the heavy machinery that makes this country run.” Allentown Metal Works incorporates everything that’s needed to complete the heaviest steel fabrications: a boring mill, two plate rollers, SMAW, FACAW, GMAW and SAW welding, heavy component assembly and 100 and 50 ton cranes, right down to Tempilstik temperature-indicating sticks or “crayons,” and Estik electronic contact-type thermometers for temperature measurement.

One of the projects Allentown Metal workers have been working on lately is an enormous structural steel truss assembly for the rebuilding of New York’s World Trade Center, the WTC Transportation Hub to be specific. Allentown Metal is a subcontractor to one of the project’s prime fabricators.

Located under No. 1 World Trade Center and other new WTC buildings, the WTC Transportation Hub will be the city’s third-largest transportation center. Designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, it will cost an estimated $3.2 billion to complete. It will be the terminus for PATH train service to New Jersey, connect to thirteen subway lines and other terminals, and link pedestrians to the World Financial Center and its ferries through an underground concourse.

Allentown Metal Works gets involved with a variety of projects: cement production machinery, mining equipment and power generation, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure. Many of these projects are being built for the first time, and versatility is the nature of the business. With its overall large capacity, the plant is equipped to handle very sizeable and heavy material.

A Tempilstik is a temperature-sensitive wax crayon that melts at a specific temperature, so welders can verify the surface temperature of a workpiece.

The Allentown plant site was designed to build kilns for the cement industry: huge structures, some of the largest such structures in the world. The company has been in business for several generations, and currently employs about 80 workers. It started out as a fabricator of cement-making and mining equipment, and while it continues to do some of this work — both new and replacement equipment assignments — it is essentially a huge job shop now, doing many kinds of big-metal fabrication.

Allentown Metal Works is fabricating the west trusses for the WTC transportation hub, one piece of the underlying support for the final structure. The trusses are essentially large arches with bearing connectors in the center: in effect, a final canopy, almost like a bridge, supporting and distributing the load and holding up one entire section of the No. 1 World Trade Center mass-transit entrance. They are complex assemblies that have to be finally assembled in the field.

The tremendous load to be supported will include actual streets, the traffic traveling on them, and even sections of buildings, like a supporting arch underneath the city. The strain on these very critical structures will be tremendous, so they are being fabricated to “critical quality” standards: the highest quality under U.S. Codes. Allentown Metal’s portion of the truss project is estimated to involve more than six months’ production time.

There are approximately two-dozen studs, 3/4-inch or 1-inch diameter by 7 or 8 inches long, all welded on to the structure. In all, 24 truss sections will have a span of about 25 ft, with diagonals tying them together; huge, 18-in. thick plate node blocks, machined and beveled, and 8-in. and 4-in. plate where the super-block ties on. Node blocks vary in size. Some parts are beveled, and then welded together into a solid piece, higher at one end. The target date for operational delivery of the components is 2011. To complete the critical WTC fabrications, Allentown brought in more welders qualified in the mode and procedures, as well as advisors to facilitate the work.

The pieces will trucked to the construction site. They will be 40 ft long, weighing a dozen tons, and thus very heavy to take on the road and across the Hudson River by bridge, tunnel or possibly by barge.