Lay it out once. Mark it, cut it, punch it, and ship it knowing it bolts up in the field. The math shown on every piece — no CAD seat, no detailer queue, no desk.
START YOUR 2 WEEKS FREEIf you can sketch a piece on a scrap of plate, you can run this app. Your finger is the soapstone.
Field change at 7 a.m. doesn't wait two days for a revised drawing. Re-lay it out and keep cutting.
Works on the phone in your pocket, on the shop floor, at the layout table, or on the deck.
Every cut, hole, and bolt count prints its math. Check it before the torch is lit.
Drag your finger the way the steel runs. Pick the shape and size — W, HSS, channel, angle, plate — and it carries the real section dimensions.
Shear tabs, clip angles, base plates, gussets and stiffeners. Give it the hole layout and it counts every hole and every bolt, nut, and washer.
It assigns the piece marks and prints them with the layout, so the shop, the truck, and the erector are all reading the same tag.
Cut list with the math shown, hole schedule, bolt kits counted per connection, and the consumables on their own list.
Put your instructions in out loud. It comes back with “got it” so you know it heard you — and that is all it ever says. No follow-up questions. No reading a paragraph back at you. Nothing piping up with “in five hundred feet, make a U-turn” at six on a Monday morning when you had a good weekend and don’t want to hear a voice at all.
It speaks with your device’s own voice, not one of ours — so it already sounds like the phone or tablet in your pocket.
You: “Beam’s twenty four seven and a half, shear tab both ends”
It: “Got it.”
You: “Add a shear tab on the far end.”
It: “Got it.”
Then it gets out of your way. Everything it did is on the screen for when you’re ready to look.
The number you lose is the one you read at the top of a ladder and wrote down two minutes later. Say it the second you read it and it’s in the sketch, on the right leg, before you’ve moved.
And the guy who’s been running work for thirty years shouldn’t have to learn to thumb-type to use the tool that carries his own knowledge. He talks. It listens.
Drag your finger. Mark the holes. That's the training.
Fab-Shot is field-tested by BA Steel crews on live commercial work. These are our jobs — nothing staged.
What gets welded on the table and what gets bolted on the deck are two different lists — and two different bills. Say which is which and the app splits them.
Tabs, gussets, stiffeners, and base plates welded down before it ships — with the weld length figured so the wire and gas get counted.
Every field connection ships as a kit: bolts, nuts, washers — counted per hole, bagged per mark. One missing bag doesn't stop a crane day.
The app leaves the gap the weld needs instead of a cut that fits perfectly and welds badly.
Say it once. Coating gets figured by square foot and lands on its own line — not buried in the steel order.
Not "a box of 3/4s." Counted by hole, by grade, by length — with the nuts and washers to match.
Base plates need them. Nobody orders them. It counts them with the plate.
Counted per column, and flagged early — because they're set in concrete weeks before your steel shows up.
The small plate that holds the whole connection — cut from the same drop and counted, not scrounged.
Every shop has one. The guy who looks at a print and just knows — which end to hook, how much gap the weld needs, that the anchor bolts have to be ordered before the steel, that the piece is going to fit because he laid it out from the benchmark like he always does.
He learned it over forty years, mostly from someone else who never wrote it down either. Now he's retiring — and unless somebody catches it, all of it leaves with him.
Meanwhile the new guy gets a tape, a print, and "figure it out." He's not lazy. Nobody ever taught him. That gap is what costs you scrap steel, rework, a crane day nobody planned for, and the good young hands who quit because they felt stupid.
Real section dimensions for W, HSS, channel, angle and plate. Hole layouts, bolt grades and lengths, weld allowances. Not guesses. If a dimension isn't published, it says VERIFY instead of pretending.
It flags the connection that won't make up — the clip with no edge distance, the piece cut to fit with no root gap — before the torch is lit. The save happens at the table, not on the deck.
Layout dimension, hole spacing, and bolt count printed next to the piece mark. The apprentice learns the layout while he uses it — that's how it actually sticks.
The layout knowledge of a forty-year fabricator, in every pocket in the shop, on every job, forever. That's the whole point.
None of this was ever a secret. It's just what needs to be taught — and nobody ever wrote it down. So we did, and we're giving it away. We're not holding the trade hostage behind a paywall. The app is the product. The knowledge belongs to the trade — hand it to your apprentice on day one, print the whole thing and hang it in the shop.
Two tracks. Every box reads itself out loud if you'd rather listen than read.
Learn the app in an afternoon.
The trade behind the buttons. Hand this to every apprentice on day one.
Layout by benchmark: pick one end of the piece and call it zero. Every hole, every clip, every mark on that piece gets measured from zero — never from the hole you just punched. Tape off the last mark and every small error adds to the next one, all in the same direction, and by the far end you're out by more than the sum of anything you can point at. Measure from zero and an error stays exactly one hole's problem.
Then bolt it up: count by hole, not by box. A connection is holes × (one bolt + one nut + the washers your spec calls for), by grade and by grip length. Bag it per piece mark. A bolt bag nobody counted is discovered at height, on a Friday, with the crane on the clock.
That's one paragraph out of twenty modules. All of it free.
No login. No email. Print it and hang it in the shop.
It's funny because it's true, and it's true because we've all lived it. Every laugh has a lesson hiding in it — that's how the trade trains the new guy, and it's how we built the app.
Don't like reading? Neither do we. Hit 🔊 LISTEN on any box and it reads that one out loud.
Nobody ever quit the trade over a hard day — they quit over being lost and too proud to say so. Humor is how crews teach without anyone admitting they're learning. That's the product too. Fab-Shot tells you the truth about the math and never makes you feel stupid for asking.
The full layout and takeoff engine, cut lists, hole and bolt schedules, and the complete training library. Same price for a one-man shop or a hundred hands.
START MY 2 WEEKS FREE2 weeks free, then $59/mo per seat. Cancel anytime.
Step-by-step how-to videos plus Foreman School — layout by benchmark, reading shop drawings, fit-up and root gap, bolt-up and torque, rigging it once.
Steel doesn’t fit in a bucket. You have to have all of it, and it gets ordered off the cut list — you don’t scrounge a beam. So on fab the Bucket is the other half of the order: the consumables, the welding wire, and the bolts and odds and ends that quietly stop a shop.
Figured off the actual weld length in the job — so the spool doesn’t run dry mid-bead on a Friday.
Counted per hole and per grade, then bagged per piece mark. Not “a box of 3/4s and hope.”
The consumables nobody writes on the order and everybody runs out of. Counted with the work.
Shims, leveling nuts, anchor bolts, clips. Small parts, big holdups — and what’s already on the rack comes off the order.
The steel gets ordered. Everything else gets counted.
Fab-Shot is field-proven by BA Steel crews on real commercial work. Drop your email and your two weeks start the day we open the doors.