Commercial Shop Insulation — Falcon Construction / MC Welding

This one was a big building. Falcon Construction brought us in to insulate a new red-iron commercial shop north of Gillette for MC Welding — a working welding shop that needed to actually be usable through Wyoming winters, not just survive them.

A red-iron commercial shop, not a backyard pole barn

This is a large structural-steel building — red I-beam columns, red-painted roof purlins, tall sidewalls, and a sectional overhead door big enough to roll equipment through. Spraying closed-cell foam on a building this size is a different job than insulating a residential cavity. You are working off scissor lifts, you are managing pass speed against steel that telegraphs every miss, and you are sealing a thermal envelope that has to handle a working welding shop on the inside and high-plains wind on the outside.

Walls and roof deck between the purlins

We sprayed the roof deck between the purlins first — that is the surface that traps the most heat in summer and loses the most in winter, and on a red-iron building the underside of the deck is what you see when you look up. Foam between the purlins gives you a continuous insulated lid without losing any usable interior height. Then we came back across all four walls and built the foam right up to and around the tall overhead door opening so the thermal envelope did not have a hole in it where the door header lives.

Working off lifts in a working bay

Most of the spray work happened from a rolling scissor lift extended high enough to reach the ridge. With a building this tall, keeping pass speed and gun distance consistent is what separates a finished cavity from a thin spot you will find on the first cold morning. The crew worked methodically panel-to-panel and bay-to-bay so the building got one continuous monolithic foam envelope rather than a patchwork.

Why closed-cell on a welding shop

Closed-cell foam does more than R-value. It air-seals every gap between the wall panels, purlins, and door framing, it adds rigidity to the wall assemblies under wind load, and it is dimensionally stable when the shop heats up under work — none of the sag or settling you get with batt insulation in a tall metal building. For a commercial welding shop that will see hot work, fork traffic, and Gillette winters for the next thirty years, that durability matters.

Partners on the project

We worked alongside Falcon Construction as general contractor — clean coordination, clear sequencing, foam in the air without holding up the rest of the trades. The end user is MC Welding, the welding shop that operates out of the building. Good build, good partners, good result.