About Weld Blend Vault

The vault part was a joke between colleagues, but it stuck.

Kenji Murakami started Weld Blend Vault in the spring of 2017, after eleven years working as a structural welder and then site supervisor for Toyo Fabrication in Yokohama. The name came from a habit he kept from his early years: a small notebook where he logged every filler metal combination, preheat temperature, and interpass reading from jobs that went well. The vault part was a joke between colleagues, but it stuck. The company launched with two welders, a secondhand Lincoln Electric Power Wave, and a rented bay in an industrial estate off Route 409 in Kawasaki.

The first two years were mostly subcontract work for a mechanical contractor in Tsurumi. In the winter of 2018, a pipe failure at a food processing plant in Sagamihara brought the first direct client relationship. The plant manager needed a repair done over a weekend shutdown, with a written procedure and a hydrostatic test result before Monday morning. Weld Blend Vault delivered both. That job led to a three-year maintenance contract and, eventually, to the decision to invest in a proper workshop space and a second welding bay. The current workshop at 2-14-8 Ogimachi, Kawasaki-ku opened in early 2020.