Detroit’s largest sheet metal contractor, Ventcon, is fabricating historic levels of ductwork for mega projects across the United States.
Construction for expanding manufacturing capacity hit a 20-year high in 2024, and the complexity and scale of some of these projects are massive. For Instance, Ford’s Blue Oval Stanton battery lab consist of 4 million square feet of battery manufacturing space under one roof.
As a trade partner to construction Manager Walbridge, Ventcon has won two contracts with Ford’s Blue Oval project for EV development. Ventcon bought unoccupied warehouses and converted them into sheet metal shops, at first, in Jackson, Tennessee. Planning for the shop started in March 2022, with deliveries to the site starting in January 2023. By May 2023, Ventcon joined the Kaiser Enterprise vertically integrated family of companies.
“It’s an exciting venture, Kaiser has been a key supporter of our vision,” said Scott Smith, executive vice president of Ventcon.
“We went through extensive efforts and investments to receive, layout, and commission all the equipment. Simultaneously, onboarding a crew of sheet metal workers, training them, and getting them to build it to our quality of standards,” added Todd Hill, president of Ventcon. “All while trying to revitalize a building and make it manufacturing worthy”.
Ventcon repeated this process in Marshall and now Livonia, Michigan, finishing the Livonia shop in October this year. Ventcon has been a signatory contractor to Local 80 Sheet Metal Workers Union since 1970. With the expansion into Jackson, Tennessee and Marshall, Michigan, Ventcon is now also a signatory contractor to Local 4 and Local 7 Zone 1 Sheet Metal Worker Unions.
Ventcon manufactured 2.2 million pounds of ductwork, equating to 37 miles of ductwork in 2023 out of the new Jackson fab shop, meeting 90% of Ford’s Stanton, Tennessee site’s sheet metal needs. Rich Styles, manufacturing director, attributed the successful growth of Ventcon’s manufacturing presence to the leadership at Ventcon, training new sheet metal workers under the guidance of Sheet Metal Journeymen Cliff Brumley, Kevin Dowdy, Rob Moore, and Mike Poole. Across all locations, they repeated a training and quality assurance program that’s resulted in less than 2% rejection rate on finished goods.
EV Plant Duct Leakage Requirements
Specifications for EV manufacturing require duct leakage below ½ of ½%. This meant the Ventcon team had to deliver consistently tight seams with quality control oversight.
“It changed our focus. We had to dial in our lock seams, make sure our roll form seams were adequate, and pay attention to it more than ever before,” Styles said. “We’ve always had QC, but here we undertook duct leak testing internally, with third parties, and provided our customer with reporting showing our duct leakage allowance.”
Large diameter spiral duct has proven popular for EV plant designs. Each of Ventcon’s new shops is outfitted with Lockformer 2.0 Spiral Machines.
For rectangular duct, they rely on an Iowa Precision Pro Fabriduct, with a new technology called Full Width Longitudinal Seam production.
“As it pertains to this particular EV Plant and the stringent leakage requirement of less than ½ of ½% with 800 leak tests, Ventcon was able to pass all 800 leak tests on round one,” said Mike Bailey, senior vice president of sales at Mestek Machinery.
Full Width Longitudinal Seam production lends itself to manufacturing duct with less chance of leakage.
“Basically, with this new technology we are able to manufacture ductwork from transverse joint to transverse joint at the longitudinal seam with no notch hole on either end of the longitudinal seam,” Bailey added. “We performed a leakage test in Atlanta on 24Ga and 18Ga 25’ runs with the new technology against the older style of duct work. Those tests showed anywhere between 25-30% less chance of leakage with the new technology.”
Manifolding and Prefabrication
Ventcon incrementally stepped into a more national business model eight years ago, on a small scale, with a 20,000 square foot operation down the street from their Allen Park shop producing the Elite Air Products line of spiral duct and round fittings only. Styles headed that operation for 5 years before leadership tasked him with opening the 80,000 square foot shop near Jackson, 700 miles away.
“This was a big leap for me, and I learned a lot about myself. The pressure was on with the aggressive schedule to have the operation up and running, delivering ductwork within 120 days from the day of receiving the keys to the building. With the expansions of Jackson in Tennessee and Livonia and Marshall in Michigan, we now have a total of 250,000 square feet of shop space with 95 skilled trades men and women manufacturing duct,” Styles said. “We rely on our shop superintendent’s leadership throughout the space.”
Hill said they’re moving into a larger space in Livonia, where they will focus on prefabrication and manifolding and take it to the next level. Ventcon is consolidating their Local 80 Allen Park and Melvindale fab shops under one 125,000 sq ft roof in Livonia.
“This will make us much more efficient,” Hill said, noting that their second Ford Blue Oval project, Marshall, adopted cutting edge manifolding and prefabrication processes. Implementing more prefabrication was always a goal for Ventcon.
“We would create these assemblies where the shop would install the adjoining reducer to the spiral duct. It sounds simple, but it eliminates the chance of that reducer missing on site,” Styles said. “When you’re shipping 50 truckloads a week to a 4 million sq ft building, logistical challenges arise. we’re focusing more on shop assemblies and prefab.”
“As we enter into our new shop space in Livonia, the 125,000 sq ft building will allow us to increase productivity by means of streamlined processes with forward thinking of prefabricated assemblies and endless possibilities,” Hill concluded.