Structural and reinforcing ironworkers fabricate, assemble, and install these products. They also repair, renovate, and maintain older buildings and structures such as steel mills, utility plants, automobile factories, highways, and bridges. Before construction can begin, ironworkers must erect the steel frames and assemble the cranes and derricks that move structural steel, reinforcing bars, buckets of concrete, lumber, and other materials and equipment around the construction site. This equipment arrives at the construction site in sections. There it is lifted into position by a mobile crane.
Ironworkers then connect the sections and set the cables to do the hoisting.
Once this job has been completed, structural ironworkers begin to connect steel columns, beams, and girders according to blueprints and instructions from supervisors and superintendents. Ironworkers do this work in fabricating shops generally located away from the construction site. In fabrication shops, iron workers lay out the raw steel received from a steel mill and cut, bend, drill, bolt, and weld each piece according to the specifications for that particular job. Ironworkers at the construction site unload and stack the fabricated steel so it can be hoisted easily when needed. To hoist the steel, ironworkers attach cables from a crane or derrick.