|
Mountain Enterprises was first started in Franklin, W. Va., in 1971. Donald Shaw started the company with the help of a Washington D.C. neighbor in this remote part of West Virginia to get away from the fast pace of the city. Donald's extensive experience in the steel construction industry enabled Mountain Enterprises to provide a detailing service for fabricators in the Washington-Baltimore area. Mountain Enterprises remained a small family operated detailing firm until moving to its present location in Shepherdstown, WV in 1978.
Shepherdstown provided an opportunity to increase the number of professionals available to hire. The firm expanded to about twenty people by 1987. Mountain Enterprises now provides a detailing service for firms across the country. In the last ten years we are proud to have been involved with some of the largest and most difficult projects in the USA.
In 1982, Mountain Enterprises started using computers to detail steel. At that time Donald Shaw invested a large sum of money in our first desk top computer, an HP 9845b. For five years we developed a batch type detailing system that worked on an 11 x 17 sheet fed plotter. At the 1987 AISC conference in New Orleans, we introduced our IBM desktop software product, the ME2 detailer. Although we were never successful in selling our product, we were able to detail many complex projects with ME2.
In 1998 we evaluated a new detailing software product, Xsteel developed by Tekla in Finland. We decided that this 3D spatial database was superior to the competition, including our own software. Since that time we have invested in numerous licenses and sent our engineers to Finland to learn the Xsteel macro language. Mountain Enterprises and Tekla are working together to further the development of the software. We continue to retain our goal of using the most advanced technology available.
Mountain Enterprise has recently started a training program to further growth. We feel that entry-level detailers need to spend at least one year detailing on the drawing board to ensure a basic understanding of steel construction. A senior detailer takes the students through the process of detailing complete small jobs in the ten to one hundred ton sizes.
|
