Finishing talent helps Virginia metal fabricator stand out

Shickel Corp. was involved in a major overhaul of the West Campus Union at Duke University, Durham, N.C., in 2015. The project goal was to tie the new construction, which included modern styling and amenities, with the original gothic stone architecture. Shickel fabricated and installed blackened steel panels that acted as a portal between the original building and the new construction.

In 2008 Shickel Corp., Bridgewater, Va., participated in the fabrication of a squid display tank for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The finishing details on the project stand out to this day.

At the time the metal fabricator hadn’t done a bunch of this type of work, but it recently had completed a heavy-duty steel display case for the Tredegar Iron Works museum in Richmond, Va., which was the biggest ironworks in the Confederacy during the American Civil War and is now a part of the U.S. National Park Service. The original specification for the squid tank was a general stainless steel display case. (Some companies specialize in working with museums, coordinating the design, woodwork, lighting, audio/visual, and even metalwork. When the metalworking projects grow too large, they reach out to contractors like Shickel Corp.)

The case, which had to accommodate a super-sized female squid, some of which can reach 50 ft. long, was supposed to be covered with wood. However, when the case was installed the display designers liked the stainless steel and decided to work with that.

“I joke a lot of times because … designers have this wonderful world of Pinterest out there with pictures and ideas. They see something and say, ‘Hey, I want that.’ But they see it on a small scale. How do you scale that up and actually produce that? That’s kind of what we ended up figuring out,” said Mark Whalen, who supervised the squid tank project and now serves as Shickel’s vice president, project management.

To meet the new expectations, Whalen and his colleagues set up two-by-four barriers to block off the area, set up lights near the tank, and went to work. They put random orbit finishes on the tank’s exterior and then used different polishing heads to create waves and the appearance of a squid moving through the water. When executing the latter finishing touches, the polishers were following sketches created by one of the display designers.

At the end of the day, everyone liked the final touches. No one clamored to have the tank covered up with wood.

For a while Shickel was involved in quite a few museum projects that required visually pleasing results, Whalen said. Even as that work slowed in the ensuing years, mechanical finishing remained an important offering for the company. Customers in the food-processing and pharmaceutical industries are always very concerned about the finishes on stainless steel equipment, and more architects on the commercial construction side of the fabricating business have begun specifying specialty finishes that are challenging to correct. Finishing is now considered a competitive advantage for the metal fabricator.

The FABRICATOR chatted with Whalen to talk about Shickel’s finishing capabilities, how the company develops its talent, and how that skills manifests itself in recent work.

The FABRICATOR: What’s it like working with customers as they try to describe exactly the type of final finish they want on their fabrications?

Mark Whalen: Working with a designer or an artist involves a lot of “I like that” or “I don't like that” and “Do more of this” and “Do more of that.” It requires a good collaboration between the two. It’s also not something that you can easily put down on a print or write into a spec. You have to touch it, feel it, and see it firsthand.

When this display tank for a female giant squid was installed in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in 2008, the display designer decided to ditch the woodwork framing in favor of a specialized finish on the case’s stainless steel surface. Workers at Shickel Corp., the fabricator of the display, were able to translate sketches into patterns that mimic the waviness of the ocean with a squid swimming through it. Images: Shickel Corp.

For example, when we run into some of the architectural finishes, such as the blackening of steel, seeing “blackened steel” on drawings leaves open a broad spectrum of what you can do.

We had one customer who wanted burnishing of aluminum. We worked with a little bit of an acid. We introduced a fair amount of black and ink. We did some antiquing to it to create different dents and dings. The owner’s rep came down here and even used some of our chains and mallets on the material. He wanted to leave some different imperfections on it. We literally had a fabricator here that was swinging the chains to achieve a certain pattern.

Again, it’s that collaboration where you have the end user who has a vision in his head of what he wants and you just can’t put it on paper to explain the final look. So it’s like, “Hey, let’s do it together.”

FAB: Is that attention to detail and being able to create the right finish a natural extension of the polishing work that Shickel does for its food-processing and pharmaceutical customers?

Whalen: I’d say you cut your teeth on the pharmaceutical stuff, where everything is smooth to a certain RA. They spec out usually like an RA 25 or 30 that they want on their product contact stuff. That calls for different polishing supplies and tools. One of our fabricators, for example, took a standard air tool and modified it a little bit with a wheel on the end, just to make it a little bit more efficient. And with tools like that, you are creating different scratch patterns and you learn how to how to go about polishing and wearing down the weld evenly so you don’t get undercut in one spot.

There’s an art to it. You can damage stuff pretty fast if you get too hard onto it. Then you have to go back, weld over it, put more heat into it, and cause it to warp.

So definitely the skill set of being able to carefully remove metal and shape it with a grinder and a sanding or polishing wheel is very advantageous for us, not only in the stainless work, but also in the steel workup.

We’re doing a cool job right now. It looks like two giant beehive sculptures. It's a bunch of 2-in. tubes rolled horizontally, and then there are a bunch of 1-in. bars going up the side all the way around it. So wherever the round tube meets the bar, it’s welded all the way around.

The architect was very specific. He said they wanted a NOMMA 1 weld, which is no evidence of the weld. Now this thing is going to get a three- or four-coat paint finish on the entire thing. If we just wash the weld and smooth it out, by the time you put four coats of paint on it, it’s going to really smooth it out. Nope. This designer wanted to ground the weld completely smooth. He knew what he wanted.

It’s more like a piece of art to him. So we’re building them in big halves about 16 ft. tall and about 12 ft. diameter. We’ve got our steel fabricators in there with fine belt sanders dressing the welds.

This is the completed squid tank. Female giant squids can reach more than 50 ft. in length.

A lot of our guys are trained to do both welding and polishing. You know, a welder can make the polisher’s job a nightmare if he’s not careful. So if you’ve got skin in both tasks, you’re a little bit more attentive to both sides.

Right now, we have three guys in our polishing shop. That’s primarily all they do, usually just for the stainless stuff.

FAB: What’s the next step for some of these polishers?

Whalen: A lot of guys start out in the polishing department and move up to fabricators. They get the polishing down and express interest in learning how to weld, fabricate, and fit up. In fact, all of our stainless steel fabricators have polishing skills, but they don’t polish all day long.

FAB: Why do you think that is a good stepping stone to becoming a fabricator?

Whalen: I see it as learning to pay attention to detail. I mean, they can be engaged there. That’s a testament to them being able to meet some tough customer specs.

It’s not a superfast process. You can train on it, and it’s repeatable—the tools, the hand positions, the different grips, the different belts, and the different pads. If you watch a new polisher closely, you’re not going to get too far out in the weeds. You can correct really quickly. On the fabrication side, you start putting heat into the stuff and working stuff, and sometimes the fix is to throw it in the dumpster and start over. So polishing can be a little bit more controlled.

Also, you get to try different techniques when polishing. I know some of the guys, as they’re doing some polishing, they find some pits or something like that. If they have the fabrication skills, they might start doing some of the weld touch-up themselves rather than sending the piece back to the fab shop to be touched up.

FAB: Where does the finishing and polishing work take place on the Shickel campus?

Whalen: Our stainless steel fab area is split up into two different buildings. Adjacent to one of our stainless steel fab shops is our polishing shop. We have three guys in there. We’ve got three different workstations, and we’ve got a Kuhlmeyer, a large belt sander that polishes bars and sheets. We get pretty creative with how we fixture things up so that the sander can dig into the surface, because that's about as close as we can get to a factory finish.

Mark Whalen helps create the specialty finish on the squid tank. Most of Shickel’s installers have some sort of experience with polishing.

And that’s one of the challenges we deal with: No two polished finishes will ever match 100%. If you’re working on stainless steel elevator surrounds, which we do a lot, and you have a little nick somewhere, it sticks out like a sore thumb. So you end up going over the entire surface.

For the nonstainless steel work, we have a different area in the front shop. That way we can avoid contamination between the two.

We’ve also got in-house passivation. We have a 6- by 6- by 5-ft. tank for a dip process. Mostly we’re running pharmaceutical materials through that, and if we have any contamination issues on some other material, we’ll run it through the passivation as well.

FAB: Is the general polishing work a good foundation for tackling the specialty finishes Shickel encounters with its museum and architectural work?

Whalen: That specialty niche requires an attention to detail. I think that your run-of-the-mill miscellaneous metal or red iron fabricator, when they get into the museum stuff, that’s a whole different ballgame for them. We know it’s a high bar to meet from the get-go, and customers are going to be very stringent and particular.

If you’re working here, you have to have that attention to detail. If you want to do quick and dirty red iron work, we’re probably not going to be a long-term good fit because we don’t have enough of that to keep you busy. We're going after the nice stuff, the odd stuff, the stuff that other people can’t handle. That’s what makes it exciting and fun.

FAB: Does Shickel do anything special with its lighting in these polishing areas, given that finishes can look a bit different as lighting changes?

Whalen: Yeah. Lghting makes a huge difference on what the surface appearance looks like, so a couple of years ago Shickel upgraded the lights with LEDs that made the shop a lot brighter. And last year we painted the entire shop white, which helped brighten it up.

When we have questions about a polish or a finish, we’ll carry the material outside and use the natural light, because that makes a big difference. We also have a small flashlight, but calling it a flashlight doesn’t do it justice. It’s supposed to simulate different light levels. We’ve used that for our inspection process, shining that light on it at different angles.

We started using those lights back 2017 when we were doing a large job at Duke University with blackened steel panels. On that job, the architect gave us a 2- by 3-in. sample of what he said he wanted the finish to look like, and we had to pull it all together so that it looked the same on a 6- by 6-ft. sheet of steel.

Shickel also installed mirror-polished stainless steel columns that support a terraced walkway at Duke’s West Campus Union.

They couldn’t tell us how they got the finish. They just said, “Hey, this is what we want it to look like.” I think we made more than 400 samples trying to get the finish the way they wanted. We finally got it figured out and put it into production.

FAB: What was it like to try to create that blackened steel finish?

Whalen: That was our first big jump into blackened steel. The customer was asking for a Sculpt Nouveau acid-etched surface, so we started with a dyeing process. We put a little bit of a random orbit finish on the backside of the steel, and that gave us a bit of depth. Then we did a little bit of clear dye, black die, and a little green dye over that. We put a clear matte powder over it all, and it turned out really well.

I've been back a couple of times since it was done, and it still looks good.

FAB: The Duke University project involved constructing a new modern space that integrated with a more traditional building. Anything else stand out about that project from a finishing perspective?

Whalen: We fabricated duplex stainless steel columns that were polished to a mirror finish. These structural columns were 8 in. wide and had a wall thickness of 0.5 in. They also had little 6-in. stubs at the top and bottom. The columns supported a completely elevated concrete slab.

At the beginning of this project we got our stainless steel supplier and a tube manufacturer involved. Our steel supplier would cut the blanks from plate, and then they were sent to the tube manufacturer, where the columns were formed. Then they were sent to a polisher to be mirror-polished. And then we brought them here, and we welded the stubs on the ends and did a little bit more touch-up polishing before we installed them.

Well, to do all this, we met with all the vendors up front, because a mirror polish is not forgiving at all. If you scratch it during construction, you’re screwed. Because these columns were installed in November of one year, they weren’t uncovered for like a year and a half after, when construction was complete. We had built boxes for each column and shipped them that way during the manufacturing process. They basically lived in those wooden boxes, and we installed them surrounded by those same wooden boxes. At the end of construction, we pulled the boxes off, peeled the plastic off, and exposed the mirrored surface.

FAB: Do you see Shickel’s knowledge of specialty finishes, or even the willingness to figure out how to get to a specialty finish, to be a competitive advantage for the company?