Above: Toby Glen, Eric Miller, COO Alex Grasdalen and Chance Sheffield in the shop at Bemidji Steel Co.
September, 2025- In Minnesota’s Lake Country, about three hours north of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, sits a fullservice metals distributor and fabricator: Bemidji Steel Co. (BSC) in Bemidji, Minnesota. The company is a has business activity throughout the lower 48 states with a core focus on manufacturers in industries such as agriculture, defense and industrial products.
“I have been with the company since 2018,” says Alex Grasdalen, COO. “My family started the business in 1983,” he says, and it remains family owned. At the time he started, the company had five employees.
In 2022, Bemidji Steel built a smart factory. “We have a highly flexible production center alongside steel distribution. We can produce parts on demand as customers need them. We use software to enhance that capability.” In other words, says Grasdalen, “this is more modern than the traditional metal service center because we have a new approach to market.”
A set of rotary brushes cleans and polishes the surfaces of sheet and plate products.
Erecting the greenfield factory “increased our capacity substantially. It was a unique opportunity and was built with growth in mind. A lot of our competition adapts to what they have. We took a blank sheet of paper to plot the company’s future capabilities.” Today, he says, “we have 50 employees. I have a great direct team, each of whom focuses on one segment of the value chain for our company. They run each segment in partnership with each other,” which fosters agility in response to customers. “We have a flat and efficient organizational structure enhanced by software.”
PRODUCTS & SERVICES
“The service center business is full line,” says Grasdalen. “We handle all material types— carbon, stainless and aluminum in all shapes and sizes. Our smart factory is designed to process what our core distribution business sells. Services include laser cutting for plate, sheet, tube and structural products. That is complemented by providing finishing, welding and painting services.
“The goal is to be on call for our customers and deliver a premium experience. Additional processes such as machining are provided with strong local partnerships.” Most of the parts the company produces end up in agricultural equipment and defense applications, and “then a wide variety of other uses.”
On the fabrication business, he says, “We have highly skilled people working here. This is a desirable place to live, particularly for outdoor recreation, but there are few industrial companies.” Nonetheless, the company is able to recruit and retain employees from far away.
“We train all of our staff, because nobody comes to us with experience in this business or operating exactly like we do.”
BSC operates Trumpf and Bystronic lasers, which are connected through its proprietary software systems.
Finishing complex shapes and profiles becomes less of a challenge with a machine that performs deburring, edge rounding and finishing, like the Arku Edgebreaker 6000.
DEBURRING
Recently, Bemidji Steel purchased an Edgebreaker 6000 from Arku Inc. The global headquarters for Arku is based in Baden-Baden, Germany, whereas the U.S. headquarters for Arku Inc. is in Cincinnati.
The machine, which performs deburring, edge rounding and surface finishing, is as flexible as the laser cutting machines it is frequently paired with, according to Arku.
The Edgebreaker 6000 completely processes punched and laser cut parts in a single pass. First, the grinding belt removes burrs from laser-cut edges. The rotary brushes ensure uniform edge rounding, even to a radius as small as 0.078 inch for sheet metal. Both large and small sheet metal parts can securely be processed thanks to a built-in vacuum table. The model is particularly suitable for laser job shops with constantly changing processing requirements, Arku states.
All processing units (deburring, edge rounding and surface finishing) are equipped with a quick-change system for the abrasives to minimize setup times. Users can remove the belts and rotary brushes without any additional tools.
The unit comes with a graphical touchscreen HMI, which supports operators in seffing up the machine and provides tips on operation and maintenance. Frequent jobs can be saved for repeat production runs.
The Arku Edgebreaker 6000 is particularly suitable for laser job shops with constantly changing processing requirements.
APPLICATIONS
“This is one of our more recent additions to enhance our service offerings,” says BSC’s Grasdalen. “Customers have demanding finish quality requirements; this machine helps us meet those.” Before purchasing the Edgebreaker 6000, BSC’s finished parts did not always match its internal standards. “We round the edges now, and it has been a great machine. It has even found a use case for the regraining of stainless steel. The high finish application can be very important.” For example, he says, the finish on stainless medical equipment must be uniform.
Further, the finishing equipment “has helped us grow capacity. Our previous system was not as efficient. We produce parts faster, and we have entered a few extra markets where we could not perform as reliably as we had with previous machines.”
The Arku deburring machine “has elevated the level of quality substantially from a raw laser-cut part and is better for paint adhesion on the edges. We are experiencing fewer quality rejections.”
On the welding side of the business, Grasdalen continues, “it makes that connection easier. We robotically weld parts together. It’s nice to work with the clean part as well as benefiting from the safety improvement by not having sharp edges.”
With its new metal processing approach and the great variety of parts BSC is able to produce, “we are focused on being the best one-stop processor for metal products in the country. We have a national reach and want to keep growing; we hope to see BSC become the market leader in a few years,”
Grasdalen says. Arku Inc., 513/985-0500, http://arku.com/
Bemidji Steel Co., 218/751-2000, http://bemidjisteel.com/
