In August of 2021, the Tindall team held a grand opening ceremony for our newest Upstate location, the Tindall Infrastructure Manufacturing Facility. Located in Spartanburg, SC, just minutes from our corporate headquarters and Tindall Building Systems SC, this $27.9-million production facility not only marked a major milestone in our company’s history; it also highlighted our team’s continued dedication to technological advancement and our commitment to delivering the most innovative precast utility solutions on the market.
To truly understand the importance of this expansion in our capabilities, we need to go back to Spartanburg in 1963, when Tindall first began producing precast concrete utility products out of a small shed with only six employees.
Tindall Then + Now
Nearly 60 years ago, we got our start in the precast industry with a small team in Spartanburg who specialized in producing standard underground utility solutions. The production of these components took place in a modest shed, one that still stands today at Tindall Building Systems South Carolina to remind us of our dedication to innovation, growth, and service.
Since those humble beginnings, Tindall has grown to become one of the largest producers of precast concrete building systems and infrastructure solutions in the country. With six precast manufacturing facilities throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Southeastern, and South-Central U.S., we now leverage a robust in-house engineering team and substantial capacity to deliver precast, prestressed concrete solutions across the country and internationally.
“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come,” said Joel Sheets, Senior Vice President of Operations of Tindall Infrastructure. “In the past, we focused on delivering standard precast underground components, and we found a lot of success there. But the more we grew, the more we saw that customers needed solutions that simply didn’t exist.”
The Rise in Custom Precast Utility Solutions
By the mid-1980s, the demand for custom solutions had begun to increase exponentially. While Tindall Infrastructure (then known as Tindall’s Utility Division) was well equipped to efficiently deliver standard utility products, adapting to the need for custom solutions required new processes, techniques, and systems. This shift in industry expectations and requirements marked a pivotal turning point for our team.
Adapting to an Ever-Changing Industry
“Rather than turn those opportunities away, we focused on service, put on our thinking caps, and created solutions that simply didn’t exist anywhere else,” said Sheets. “By the time I came on board in the early 2000s, Tindall was already known for creating custom solutions for our customers, but the quantity and complexity of those projects have only grown since then.”
Today, decades after Tindall Infrastructure first began delivering one-of-a-kind products, custom solutions make up a large majority of our work. But as is the case with any substantial growth, this evolution was not without its growing pains.
By the mid-2010s, our Infrastructure team was quickly outgrowing our original manufacturing facility at Tindall Building Systems South Carolina.
“While we had been delivering innovative solutions out of that location for years, the facility simply wasn’t designed to accommodate the number of custom components we were producing,” said Sheets.
That’s when we began developing a plan for a new facility focused on efficiency, automation, and the ability to facilitate both standard components and large-scale custom projects.
The New Infrastructure Manufacturing Facility
Our new Infrastructure manufacturing facility in Upstate, SC, is purpose-built for delivering a wide range of high-performance precast utility products. Today, our facility provides innovative solutions to multiple industries, including heavy civil, power & energy, petrochemical, and, of course, underground utility projects.
With 200 tons of bridge crane capacity, three bays, twin mix buckets, and Prima (the state-of-the-art wetcast automation system from Afinitas), the Tindall Infrastructure team now has the capacity, technology, and engineering horsepower to take on more complex challenges than ever before.
Our new facility has not only dramatically increased Tindall Infrastructure’s overall capacity but has also streamlined the process for manufacturing standard products to facilitate the still-growing demand for custom solutions.
“Today, serving our customers is about more than providing a catalogue of standard products,” Sheets says. “Every square inch of the new facility is purpose-built for innovation, giving us the flexibility we need to create better, more inventive products for years to come. It’s a major step forward for our team.”
What’s Next for Tindall Infrastructure?
According to Sheets, the future of Tindall Infrastructure is bright.
“With our new production facility, the sky really is the limit,” said Sheets. “We’re all excited about what the future might hold, and I can’t wait to see where the new location takes us.”
As the precast, prestressed concrete industry continues to grow and evolve, our continuous investment in our own engineering capabilities, manufacturing technologies, and state-of-the-art products ensures Tindall remains on the cutting edge.
To learn more about Tindall Infrastructure, get in touch with our team today.
