A fabricator founded on operator skill

Figure 1
DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication pushes the laser cutting limits. The tiny bike; the deep, narrow hole; and the massive 1.5-in.-thick part are all in the as-cut condition, with no deburring or subsequent polishing applied.

Walking into DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication, for a moment I thought all the machines were installed yesterday. Only they weren’t. The shop’s workhorse, a TRUMPF 6-kW CO₂ laser, is more than 7 years old. The TRUMPF fiber (using a solid-state TruDisk laser) next to it was installed in 2014. Both sit gleaming on the polished shop floor.

My attention quickly turned to a man in his early 40s crouching at a green-tinted window of the 5-kW solid-state laser. He was reading the beam, looking a little like a skilled machinist reading the chips and turning the hand crank on a knee mill. He peered at the beam, something he treated as a precision cutting tool, to be kept as pristine as possible.

After the cycle finished, he lifted the parts out of the nest easily, no hammering required. Most significant, the edge looked clean and virtually flawless, with no burr. This was all the more shocking when I realized that he was cutting 1.25-in.-thick carbon steel on a solid-state laser.

A few yards away was a man on the 6-kW CO₂ laser setting up what looked to be an impossible job: a nest of contoured parts with tight corners and a 0.75-in.-diameter hole, all cut out of—wait for it—1.5-in.-thick material. The parts again pulled out of the nest with little effort, and the edges looked absolutely perfect. The shop has no grinding department, no flat-part deburring machines, just two belt sanders and a few angle grinders (see Figures 1-4).

How in the world does this eight-person shop, tucked away behind the KwikTrip in rural New Ulm, Minn., accomplish this? The story starts in the mind of Brent Donner, the man crouching by the solid-state laser, reading the beam.

In 2008, with business partner David Dewald, Donner launched his business as a unique entity. On its surface the company operates like any small job shop. Customers submit prints, then DLC offers a quote and cuts and bends parts to suit. That’s certainly not unique. In some areas of the country, fabrication is viewed as somewhat of a commodity. Financial hurdles aside, if one shop buys a machine, there’s nothing legally stopping the shop down the street from buying the same machine. DLC also helps customers design products for manufacturability (DFM). But again, that service isn’t unique either.

What sets DLC apart is its people—more specifically, the relationship its people have with their machines. At its core, the organization sells knowledge, something that can’t be copied so easily.

Questioning the Status Quo

In the early 1990s Donner went to school for nondestructive testing and metallurgy, studying how metals react when heated, cut, and formed. In 1992 he landed a job at Hutchinson Manufacturing as a blaster. One day while running the blasting system during a stainless job, a mishap occurred and the hose shot coal diamond powder (not steel shot, thankfully) at his left leg at a pressure of several hundred PSI. He spent the next eight hours in the hospital.

The next day, to everyone’s surprise, he showed up to work, and his managers knew he couldn’t operate the blaster. So they took him to the fab shop, where he saw a 1953 punch/plasma machine that nobody could run—and he made it run.

He did it through experimentation and by asking the right questions of the right people. A veteran fabricator who had experience with G-code told him that “G 01” was a move and how all the numbers in the code relate to X and Y coordinates. Pretty soon Donner was writing his own programs from start to finish.

Figure 2
DLC cut this 1.25-in.-thick plate of carbon steel on its 5-kW solid-state system. This shows the as-cut condition, with no deburring or other finishing steps.

“Within three days I learned how to program and run it,” he said, “and the next thing I know I’m in fabrication and I’m running this 1953 machine that nobody could run. I fell in love with it right then and there. I knew metal manufacturing was where I wanted to be. I loved the idea that you could lift parts up and gain muscle, and get paid for it.”

Soon he was running a 1.5-kW TRUMPF laser, a 600-amp plasma table, and a press brake all at the same time. He would program the plasma for eight sheets, let it run, and then go over to the laser and start cutting 0.5-in. steel. Once the laser was set up, it took hours for the low-powered machine to run the sheet. That gave Donner time to go over to the press brake.

So how exactly did he learn so much so quickly? People who know him say he has an innate gift, but is there something else to it?

“Guys throughout the company would give me little hints on how to do things, but they still kept a lot to themselves for job security,” he said. “They taught me little things, and then I’d just pick it up and figure out how to run it myself.”

At Hutchinson, managers started to notice how Donner accomplished things others just couldn’t do. For instance, he cut 2-in.-thick stainless and mild steel with the CNC plasma system—again, this was in the 1990s. His metallurgy and NDT background played a role here, but he also just had a sense of how metal reacts to a “soft” cutting tool: the plasma and, most significantly, the laser.

He started on a laser with no autofocusing lens, so he learned how to dial in the focus, be it high, in the middle, or low in the material, depending on the grade and thickness. He recalled being told to run a focus of 2 mm into the material thickness for a certain job. Donner saw the resulting edge, then tweaked the focus to 2.3 mm. He got a perfect cut edge and increased speed by 20 percent.

With focus depth (as well as a lot of other variables on the laser), he learned just how difficult it is to have a solid rule of thumb. “Everything is different. Different grades react differently. Blasted, scaly, and rusty material also has an effect. You need to adapt to your surface quality.” And all these variables interact with the variables in the machine: assist gas pressure, gas type, nozzle centering and standoff distance, optics position and cleanliness, and the list goes on.

In essence, he obtained some information from industry veterans, analyzed the machine’s factory settings, and then used that information as a starting point, asking, “What can we do better?”

Launching a Unique Company

In 1999 Donner went to work for Millerbernd Design and Fabrication, and in 2005 started at AWI Manufacturing, both shops in Winsted, Minn. At that time, during a trip to Connecticut to look at a new TRUMPF laser, he met Dewald, an investor with financial means who recognized Donner’s talent. If Donner ever wanted to strike out on his own, Dewald said that he’d be happy to be his business partner. As Donner recalled, “He said, ‘I have money, and you have a gift.’”

In 2007 Donner started working at Innovative Laser in Howard Lake, Minn., for about seven months at what ended up being the first of many consulting gigs. While at Innovative, Donner met Alan Bear, who at the time was managing Innovative’ s purchasing department. “After two days talking to Brent, I realized that this guy is uncommon,” Bear recalled. “I knew this guy needed to be a consultant.”

Figure 3
DLC cut these complex components (again, in the as-cut condition) from 1.5-in.-thick carbon steel on a 6-kW CO2 laser.

Bear helped Donner formally set up his business, and Donner soon found himself working with some of the biggest companies in the fabrication business (many of which he can’t reveal on the record for competitive reasons).

Donner conceded, though, that he has a love-hate relationship with consulting work. He loves lasers; he loves visiting companies and solving problems; but he hates being on the road for weeks on end, away from his family.

His dream was to launch his own shop in New Ulm, stay close to family, and grow the company—yet in an unconventional way. He wanted the shop to be a team of highly skilled operators, where everyone knows how to run every machine on the floor. While on the road, he wouldn’t need to call back to the office continually to see if everything was OK. The team would be able to handle most problems on their own.

So in 2008 he reached out to Dewald to see if he could help purchase a new 6-kW laser and launch a job shop. Dewald jumped at the chance, made the investment, and now is DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication’s CEO.

A Learning Organization

DLC stands for Donner Laser Companies, an umbrella organization over two subsidiaries, DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication and Donner Laser Consulting.

“As our company grows, our operators eventually will become department leads,” explained Bear, now DLC’s vice president who also runs a separate metals pricing consultancy called Bear Market Intelligence (see Pricing Intelligence sidebar). “And we want them eventually to train new employees.”

The ultimate goal, Bear said, is for DLC’s manufacturing and consulting arms to provide seamless service. Say a California fabricator calls Donner to fix a laser. Donner flies out to help while DLC cuts parts to help out the California fabricator while its laser is down. “This offers a seamless integration of business operations,” he said.

Career Potential

Considering how young DLC’s operators are, each has the potential for quite a long career path ahead of them (see Figure 5). Just 30 years old, Tim Fischer, laser lead, had never seen a laser cut metal before January 2014. He worked construction jobs and fixed cars at an automobile dealership.

“The first job I ran was a plate 1.25 in. thick,” Fischer said. “Brent showed me the ropes. When I started, his desk was right next to the laser control.” He pointed to a worn spot on the otherwise gray, shiny shop floor. “He was right there, and every day I learned something new.

“He really did give me free reign to learn whatever I wanted on this machine. As I ran into problems that I couldn’t figure something out, Brent would really go in-depth about why it happened and what it was going to do to the cut.”

Figure 4
This 0.75-in. hole was laser-cut in 1.5-in.-thick carbon steel; it’s within 0.0005 in. of perfect.

During this conversation, Fischer stepped away from the laser. He had monitored it briefly, but then, as soon as he saw everything was cutting smoothly, he was free to go elsewhere. Keep in mind he did this while cutting 1.5-in.-thick material.

Fischer and the other operators have to go elsewhere to get the job done, and they’re happy to do it. “If I had to stand by a laser for an entire shift, my day would be really long,” Fischer said.

Besides Donner and Fischer, the shop has only two more machine operators. Dustin Hillesheim, 30, is the forming lead and operates the press brake primarily, though he does move over to the solid-state laser as needed. His brother Brandon, 24, is DLC’s newest employee.

“I was totally green. I was a cook before this,” Brandon said. “My first day, I stood here and, I admit, I didn’t know what to do. But I ran the laser the very first day, and Brent taught me how to look and inspect the edge to make sure everything was burr-free.”

Six weeks after he was hired, Brandon was driving fork trucks, loading material onto the solid-state laser, and downloading programs. Besides being a machine operator, he also handles shipping and receiving. He isn’t optimizing programs or nests yet, but he’s well on his way.

His brother Dustin started in 2014, about eight months after Fischer arrived. Dustin worked at an HVAC company for about four months and, before that, at a blasting and finishing operation. When he interviewed for the DLC job, he knew this company was different.

“I walked in here, and the floor was spotless,” Dustin said. “And the machines looked new. When you work in a clean place, you can keep it clean. When you have a dirty shop, it’s really difficult to have it clean again.

“At other companies, I’d ask people questions, and they were supposed to help you, but they didn’t,” Dustin continued. “They always said, ‘I’m too busy!’ Here, Brent taught me the right way. If I asked a question, he’d spend the time to teach me.”

Dustin knows how to program the press brake from scratch. He knows how to read a print, to program the machine, and determine the bending sequence. The brake actually is new enough for offline programming software, but Donner has taught Dustin the old-school way of doing things. Dustin said he has seen the offline software in action, “but now that I know how to program and set up, it really doesn’t take that long.”

Later, Donner reflected on how he’s trained all of his operators, summing it up in one simple statement. “I don’t want button-pushers in my shop; I want people who think.”

Figure 5
DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication has a youthful team. From left, standing: Tim Fischer, laser lead; Brandon Hillesheim, machine operator and packaging; Alan Bear, vice president; Todd Pfaff, estimator/buyer; Ashlyn Donner, operations intern; Dustin Hillesheim, forming lead; seated, Brent Donner, president. Not pictured is CEO David Dewald, who resides in Casper, Wyo. (“Ashlyn is my daughter,” Donner said. “I’m teaching her anything and everything about the business.”)

A Hands-on Workplace

Donner’s office is actually the smallest in the building, a windowless room immediately adjacent to the cutting lasers. He doesn’t spend much time there, though. For most of the day he’s on the shop floor. The front office is small and comfortable, with a reception desk, a conference table, and a handful of rooms.

In one of those rooms sits Todd Pfaff, DLC’s estimator/buyer who handles quoting, estimating, purchasing, shipping, and customer service. He started in 2009. “The first day Brent showed me that little bike, and I didn’t believe it came from a laser until I saw him cut it.

“I come from a customer service background. I’m a firm believer in communication. That’s what builds sales.” He paused, then pointed to pieces of cleanly cut 1.5-in.-thick carbon steel. “That, and a product that sells itself.”

DLC has no programming department. Tim Fischer and Dustin Hillesheim develop their own nesting at computer terminals adjacent to the laser. Both have been taught how to analyze and optimize a nest for optimal speed.

For instance, software may suggest that the laser cut a hole-intensive nest by jumping around the plate to dissipate the heat generated from the laser.

“But if you change it to cut in a certain order, you’ll shorten your cutting time,” Fischer said, “because you’re not going back and forth all over the plate. And you’re reducing wear and tear on your machine. Moreover, if you have big cutouts that could potentially tip while you’re cutting, you’re in trouble if the head is moving back and forth all the way across the nest.

“Nothing is guaranteed in all circumstances, but if you nest it right, you decrease your chances of having part tipping and crashing your laser head.”

Fischer said this while pointing to the 7-year-old 6-kW laser, still with the original doors, paint, cutting heads, and other components, all looking as if they were installed just a few months ago (see Figure 6).

Operators optimize the cutting sequence so that the head need not move so far from hole to hole. The resulting cutting sequence still dissipates the heat from the laser and maintains cutting accuracy, but the head also spends more time cutting metal and less time traversing between cuts.

Donner showed me another job cut earlier in the morning on the solid-state laser: a 0.135-in.-thick stainless steel with 0.040-in.-diameter holes. And next to it he held what looked to be pieces of lead from a mechanical pencil, only they weren’t (see Figure 7). “These are the slugs from those holes,” Donner said. “It’s all about getting the beam in and out as quickly as possible.” He added that this becomes possible only when the beam is pristine and cutting conditions are just right.

Figure 6
Brandon Hillesheim removes a skeleton from the laser table. Every Friday the team spends time cleaning the shop. The laser on the right, which is more than 7 years old, belies its age.

We then went back to the 1.25-in. material cut by the solid-state machine. Fischer conceded that the cut speed is extremely slow. But the shop happened to be processing a large order for a Wisconsin customer, and in order to meet the due date, the company needed to use the cutting capacity of both the CO₂ and the solid-state laser machine.

Donner and his team work with a lot of trade secrets, though they happily explain fabrication fundamentals that they use as a starting point. This includes generating their own nitrogen (which DLC started doing shortly after installing the solid-state laser) and dedicating a nitrogen-generation system to the bellows on the CO₂ laser, ensuring the optics have a path that remains pristine and free of even the smallest particulate.

They polish their lenses just so, carefully clean the fiber laser’s cover glass, and perform nozzle centering with a magnifying, lighted loupe to make sure the nozzle position is just right. The company hasn’t replaced its CO₂ optics in seven years, even though operators push the machine to its limits. (For more on this, see “3 questions to ask for better laser cutting,” archived at thefabricator.com.)

Donner has taught his operators to ask the right questions. How clean is the cutting lens and cover glass? Is the nozzle centered? Do you have the correct nozzle diameter?

Beyond this, Donner delves into his years of consulting experience working with hundreds of operators. What’s the water pressure to the optics, and is the restrictor and screen clean of debris so that water flows freely? The more water pressure you have applied to the optic, the more that optic expands, which in turn affects the focus. Change the focus, and you change your cut.

What’s the beam shape? In a CO₂ system, what’s the alignment of the beam from the resonator through the optics in the machine? If that alignment is off, the beam profile may be oblong; align it just right, and the beam profile should be perfectly round.

Continual Knowledge Exchange

When Donner first stepped foot onto a fab shop floor in the 1990s, he learned the trade by listening and watching. Industry veterans gave him hints here and there, but as is all too common in manufacturing, many kept their knowledge close to their chest. After all, those with the technical knowledge kept their jobs, right?

As Donner (and, for that matter, most of the industry) has learned, in a world of globalization and fierce competition, keeping knowledge to oneself usually hurts more than it helps. When he launched DLC, Donner vowed to not hold anything back, but instead to impart whatever he knew to his operators, and to never stop learning and questioning the status quo.

“Our people set us apart” is a hackneyed marketing phrase, for sure, but at DLC it has deeper meaning. Donner and his team present themselves as highly skilled operators, and their work, including the pristine edges they cut regularly as a matter of course, is proof of that.

Pricing Intelligence

Alan Bear joined DLC full-time in November 2015, but he has worked indirectly with Brent Donner since Donner started his laser cutting consulting business in 2007.

Figure 7
This sheet of 0.135-in.-thick stainless steel has 0.040-in.-diameter holes, cut so cleanly that their tiny slugs fell cleanly away, intact.

Bear went to college to be a speech and English teacher, but being an English teacher just wasn’t for him. So he spent a few years in real estate. “During my real estate career, I caught a whale.” He was a large investor, holding multiple apartment units in the South and houses all over Minnesota.

The investor operated a small metal service center as well as several fabrication and painting companies. That investor introduced Bear to the world of metals purchasing, fabrication, and commodities research. This led him to several jobs with Twin City Fan, first as a commodity manager and finally as a director of materials, where he ran a purchasing department of 32 people.

Bear then landed a job at Innovative Laser in Howard Lake, Minn., where he met Donner and, eventually, investor David Dewald (now CEO of DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication).

From the start they talked about a new kind of metal fabrication business. Analyzing the market, they found that—outside external pricing pressure—two things put the biggest financial strain on custom metal fabricators. The first involves skilled labor: specifically, the lack of skill in running the equipment. This led Donner to create what DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication is today.

The second entails purchasing decisions. The largest element on many fab shop balance sheets isn’t labor, it’s the material. For the past several years in the “Financial Ratios & Operational Benchmarking Survey” from the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International (FMA), average direct labor costs have been between 13 and 17 percent of sales, while average direct material costs have been between 34 and 36 percent of sales.

Here’s where Alan Bear fills a need. Along with serving as DLC’s vice president, he also runs Bear Market Intelligence, a consulting firm providing metals pricing intelligence to various manufacturers. It operates as a separate business, outside the DLC umbrella. Bear analyzes the data and informs his clients when he expects metal prices to rise (time to buy long and use financial hedges long before prices go up) or fall (time to spot-buy).

He also conducts this research for DLC and offers DLC’s customers similar pricing advice. “We can give our customers heads-up before price increases and suggest they order more. Alternatively, we can tell them when we expect prices to go down, so they should keep their orders with us short term.”

Such purchasing intelligence can be critical for maximizing success in metal fabrication. After all, no matter how well-trained operators are, a fabricator can still lose money with a poor (or absent) metals purchasing strategy.