21-year-old breaks Gen Z stereotype with metal fabrication start-up

Wyatt Braker, 21, continued to grow Plasma Cutting Services right after high school in 2020.

Wyatt Braker describes himself as a farm boy, and his story about winding his way into metal fabrication resembles startup narratives of past generations. Work was his after-school activity, both on the farm and performing miscellaneous fabrication at his father’s business, Braker Grain Systems, which sells grain handling and storage towers. Today, he owns Plasma Cutting Services (PCS), a growing fabricator in rural southwest Missouri that ships custom plates across the U.S.

Thing is, Braker isn’t from generations past. He’s accomplished much during these past few years, and, at 21 years old, he’s just getting started.

Catching the Plasma Cutting Bug

Braker breaks the Gen Z stereotype. Instead of coding the latest app, he’s working with CNCs, nesting parts on plate, tweaking part lead-ins, perfecting toolpaths. He could have gone to business school, but when he graduated high school in 2020, his plate cutting business had already hit the ground running. He had orders to get out the door.

Braker caught the fabrication bug, so much so that several years ago he could be seen adjusting the lead-in and travel settings on a conventional plasma to cut a clean hole in thick plate, tweaks that would occur automatically in the latest high-definition systems, one of which PCS now owns. About a year and a half ago, the shop also installed a CNC press brake. By the end of this year, the company plans to move into a new, 8,000-sq.-ft. building, complete with overhead cranes. Years from now, the fabrication entrepreneur might look back at 2023 as an inflection point, when that new building, new plasma cutting technologies, and a host of future dreams (including a fiber laser down the road) will guide him in new, perhaps unexpected directions.

From Farming to Fabrication

Braker’s three older brothers and his father farm in rural southwest Missouri, and his father owns Braker Grain Systems, a GSI (Grain Systems) dealer. That’s where the youngest Braker got his first taste of welding arcs.

“That’s the culture here,” he said. “I came home from school, and I went to work. I didn’t do sports. I went home and helped on the farm, and if I wasn’t doing that, I was welding.

“We’d fabricate miscellaneous transitions, dump pits, spouting parts, custom towers, and overhead structures,” Braker continued. “That’s what got me into welding. But we had to outsource [mechanized] plasma cutting. And so I did some ROI studies and said, ‘Hey, I think I can make this thing pay.’”

This was 2018, when Braker was just a teenager. Chuckling, he conceded that, yes, most teenagers don’t talk like this, but when you grow up on the farm and among small business owners, that kind of knowledge rubs off—especially for a teenager fascinated with the process of plasma cutting. He had operated a small hand-held plasma cutter on the farm, but he had yet to witness a plasma table operate in person. As Braker recalled, “Still, at that point, my interest in plasma tables became intense, almost an obsession.”

About that time was when the seeds of his current metal fabrication business were planted. He already had the desire to break away from the family business and go out on his own. After all, being 11 years his senior and more, his three older brothers were already taking leadership roles. “There really wasn’t room for another manager,” Braker said. “I also didn’t want to be a farm hand all my life, working for my brothers.”

Beginning With Conventional Plasma

So, his attention turned to the plasma arc. In 2018, he purchased a used burn table, a 6- by 12-ft. system with a 200-amp conventional plasma. “It really got things going those first two years,” Braker said, laughing quietly. “But man, that burn table was a piece of junk.”

Images: Plasma Cutting Services Inc.

The shop at Braker Grain didn’t even have three-phase power, so he powered the system with a generator that was used for running irrigators on the farm. “Obviously, it was a less-than-ideal setup,” he recalled. “I can’t tell you how many breakdowns and problems I had, but that experience really taught me the ins and outs of the machine.”

Braker recalled one vivid incident. “I was in the middle of burning a nested plate, and I heard a very loud bang.” The shaft of that generator had torn apart. “At that point, I realized this wasn’t working. We needed three-phase power!”

Braker landed his first contract work in 2018 with a few $5,000 jobs here and there—amounts that seemed huge at first, until he discovered just how much he was spending on consumables.

“That first year alone I spent $20,000,” he recalled. “That cutter would just eat up consumables. It was terrible, and I was really in the red.”

Still, all those mistakes taught him a lot about how the plasma arc operates, which in turn opened his eyes to more opportunity. Instead of closing up shop and trying something else, Braker doubled down and purchased a new conventional plasma, a Hypertherm MAXPRO200.

By March 2020, a confluence of events propelled what was then essentially a side hustle into a full-time career. First came the pandemic, which shut down the local high school in March—just several months before graduation. Braker completed his degree, but he also had more time to concentrate on his new business.

Still, it wasn’t as if education was off his radar. During his senior year, Braker had taken a host of dual-credit classes. By the time he graduated, he had about a year’s worth of college credits under his belt. He could have pursued a business degree, but not surprisingly, he put those plans on hold. Again, he had orders to ship.

By mid-2020, business shifted into high gear when contracts for wind turbine shims started coming in the door. Eventually, that made up nearly half of the fledgling operation’s revenue—and already, Braker was taking note. After all, with his family in farming and Braker Grain, he grew up knowing the importance of income diversification.

Moreover, PCS began cutting parts for oil skids, and the cut quality just wasn’t there. Braker made it work, even cutting bolt-ready holes by tweaking the lead-in characteristics and travel speed. To cut those bolt-ready holes on conventional plasma, he made sure the feed rate was slowed to between 40% and 50% of the typical feed rate (which minimized the taper), and he scrutinized the lead-in and lead-out cut paths. He experimented with a straight lead-in, starting in the center of the hole and moving in a radius near the hole edge. He’d cut the hole profile, then burned ever so slightly past the kerf entry point, to minimize the divot. He also tweaked the kerf settings to make certain holes slightly larger, making sure a bolt could slide easily through.

But all that tweaking took time. “I would cut dozens of holes and use a little different setting on each of them,” Braker recalled, adding that the experimentation taught him a lot about the idiosyncrasies of the plasma arc—but it wasn’t good for business.

Cut and formed workpieces with bolt-ready holes are staged for final inspection and shipping.

Precision Cutting and Forming

So, that December, he upgraded to a new Hypertherm XPR300 high-definition plasma system with an 8- by 24-ft. table. The system’s True Hole cutting technology uses oxygen for both the cutting and shield gas when cutting the kerf, and it uses variable feeds automatically to create bolt-ready holes—no manual tweaking required. Braker now could cut holes that were nearly taperless with only a minimal ding or divot.

“And on thinner material, it cuts like a laser,” Braker said. “I can hold 0.015 in. on 0.25-in.-thick material using 80 amps. And no, it’s not as fast as a laser, but it works well and meets our current needs.”

In 2021, he purchased an Accurpress brake with a 12-ft. bed, Wila tooling, and a multiaxis backgauge. He also brought in a Timesavers flat-part graining and deburring machine. He was just six months out of high school, and his metal fabrication startup was profitable and growing like never before.

Paperless From the Start

The small company has yet to adopt an ERP or similar system—but the place isn’t run off a traditional Excel sheet and paper-based job travelers either. Braker abhors the chaos paper creates and, hence, launched his operation entirely paperless from the get-go—using free software.

“When we get a PO, we use Google Sheets documents with the customer information, date ordered, date due, and whether material is customer supplied or not. And we can put our steel PO numbers to match up the MTRs [material test report],” Braker said. “The guys in the shop can see all this on their iPads. We put our MTRs, the nest details, and any related part drawings all in one job folder stored on the server. And when they’re done with the nest, they just edit a PDF and cross the job off. And I can see that in real time, the moment they mark off a nest. It’s simple. And again, it’s all with the iPad.”

He regularly combines jobs on a nest to achieve better material yield. Operators pull the parts off, run them through the Timesavers machine, and affix a printed label to each stack of parts. Even at this early stage, PCS’s part flow is smooth, no paper required.

“Each of the stack labels is for each unique part number,” Braker said. “It tells the quantity for the job, the PO number, the customer, and quantity nested.”

Time to Delegate

Over the past few years, the company has delved into some oil and gas work, structural steel plates, agricultural equipment, aftermarket automotive components, and more. Most of that has come through online leads.

Braker now employs three people, each of which wear multiple hats and hustle to get jobs out the door. Austin Luthi handles nesting and programming, helps in sales with small jobs, and fills in on the shop floor when needed. Matthew Morrell is a machine operator, and Luke Luthi manages the shop.

Braker himself has reached a point where he’s looking to push more responsibility down the ranks. He no longer spends much time on the floor, but he also needs to start distancing himself from the nitty gritty of every job that comes in the door.

Thick parts with high-definition plasma-cut edges sit on a cutting table.

“I’m now looking to hire someone for sales and, basically, to take things off my plate,” he said. “At some point, I can’t do it all. I’ve got to learn to delegate.”

Get Big, but Not Too Big

What’s Braker’s long-term plan? He wants the business to grow, perhaps double or triple its current size, but he never sees himself employing hundreds of people. His passion still lies in advanced fabrication machinery and, not least, automation. In PCS’s future could be a plasma cutting table with beveling capability, fiber laser cutting, and even flexible welding robotics. But Braker probably won’t be hiring a host of manual welders or assemblers.

“I’m just looking at the ROI,” Braker said, “and I think we can do a lot better with automated processes like cutting and bending. I really want to concentrate on keeping that revenue per employee metric high.”

At this writing, Braker continues to prospect and work on diversification, not just with customers but also with processes. PCS now is focused on the structural market, but it could delve into more OEM work involving precision-cut and -formed sheet metal. Where the business goes will depend on the opportunities that arise and the technology the business adopts. At 21, he’s already talking about fiber laser cutting. He’s prospecting online, partnering with other laser cutting providers in the area, and testing the waters.

“We might even change our business name as we get into more processes beyond plasma cutting,” Braker said.

As any industry veteran knows, Braker might have to backtrack, perhaps make a few extra turns, but the young entrepreneur has time on his side—not to mention a knack for making the most out of manufacturing technology, starting with the most basic of plasma cutting tables, progressing to high-definition plasma cutting and air bending, heavy plate drilling, and maintaining an entirely paperless operation. And he’s just getting started.

Wind towers rotate near Plasma Cutting Services’ current facility in rural southwest Missouri. PCS’s growth accelerated as it began cutting wind turbine shims in 2020.