The FABRICATOR and FMA celebrate 50 years together

This year, The FABRICATOR and its publisher, the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International (FMA), celebrate their 50th year anniversary of serving the metal fabrication industry.

Several years ago I visited Brent Donner, president of DLC Manufacturing & Fabrication in New Ulm, Minn. Donner has gained a following in laser cutting circles for accomplishing what few others can, especially in thick plate cutting. He has tuned his machines to the nth degree. He’s kept their optics immaculate and aligned, their beams perfectly centered, and has created some truly eye-opening results. Experts have told me that 1.25 in. is about the thickest a high-powered laser can cut. Minutes after I arrived at his shop, Donner showed me a piece of 1.5-in.-thick mild steel in a ridiculously smooth as-cut condition.

Thing was, he didn’t dwell on it. In fact, Donner spent more time describing the accomplishments of his lead laser operator, Tim Fischer, and his forming lead, Dustin Hillesheim. The two came to his shop with no experience, yet in a few years they had learned the intricacies of sheet and plate cutting and bending. They weren’t mere button-pushers but instead knew the operation inside and out: the machine maintenance, the material properties, the nest layout, the bend calculations. They knew why their machines did what they did, and they knew how to make the process even better.

They weren’t disengaged, just waiting for their shift to end. They were actively curious and genuinely fascinated about the intricacies of sheet metal cutting and bending. Talking with Donner, it was easy to tell he felt that instilling such curiosity and fascination in his employees was one of his greatest professional accomplishments.

Donner’s not alone. The FABRICATOR magazine and its publisher, the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International, has celebrated such curiosity for 50 years.

The New Manufacturing

We often hear about manufacturing’s new image. Shops now are bright and clean, not dark and dirty. This depends on the work an operation fabricates, of course. A precision sheet metal operation fabricating medical equipment will look much different than a heavy plate shop firing up a row of oxyfuel cutting torches at once.

That said, The FABRICATOR’s coverage has been less about the look of the shops and more about what’s actually in them: the technology, the people, and how both interact. Over the past 50 years that interaction has changed in significant ways.

“In the 1970s, it really was a rough-and-tumble industry.”

So said Steve Heim, president of Brenco Industries, a custom metal fabricator in Delta, B.C., Canada, recalling the shop floors he experienced in his youth. In Heim’s experience, managers and workers back then had an us-versus-them relationship. “To be honest, it wasn’t a very pleasant working environment.”

He recalled working for a company that had gone from 35 employees down to six. “Our boss advised us that we’d be taking a 10% wage cut. And someone in the meeting asked, ‘Will we ever get a chance to make this up?’ And instead of saying, ‘By God, I hope so,’ or ‘The company is close to bankruptcy and we need to work together,’ to at least offer us some hope, he simply said, ‘no.’ That was a huge learning experience for me.”

Today Heim has built Brenco into a very different kind of workplace. An implicit trust pervades the environment, driven in part by Heim’s management style but also by the technology and the sophisticated nature of the work. Even during economic downturns, people experienced in such high-end sheet metal work are tough to come by. Layoffs happen, of course, but for many shop owners they’re an absolute last resort.

In early April 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing recession, Heim called his staff together. “I told them, ‘Look, we have to work through this together. You’re all important. As company president I have two key responsibilities. One is to keep you safe and healthy and the other is to maintain your employment. That said, times will get better. We will be busy again, and there will be overtime again.’ The guys appreciate that, and they understand there’s a give and take.”

Vanessa Heim, Steve’s daughter and Brenco vice president, added, “People are people. They want what’s best for themselves and the business, and you need to give people the benefit of the doubt. By putting them first and communicating what we are able to, which is quite a bit, they understand where we’re coming from, and that we have their best interest in mind. That in turn helps build respect among everyone here.”

Furloughs and staggered work schedules have been implemented at Brenco, but Steve Heim initiated them in an unusual way. He walked out to the shop floor and gathered a team of workers together. It was no secret it was a slow time; after all, they saw the limited work they had right in front of them. “I told them, ‘You see the situation as well as I do. I don’t want to lay anybody off. Why don’t you have a conversation and decide how you want to manage it?’”

Employees considered the options. They didn’t talk about seniority or job rank. They instead talked about operational needs as well as each other’s financial needs. Some people have mortgages to pay and kids to feed and educate. “Others might be at a different point in their lives where time is more important than money,” Heim said. “So they worked it out. This system has seemed to work out for us very well.”

Brenco is a family business, and such an approach might not suit other work environments. Regardless, it couldn’t happen without mutual respect.

Agents of Change

Thom Shelow and Teresa Beach-Shelow have led Superior Joining Technologies for almost 30 years. The Machesney Park, Ill.-based operation focuses on high-end aerospace work, like the welded exhaust system components for SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket—the one that can take off and land vertically, and in late May carried several Americans to the International Space Station.

Still, Superior Joining itself might never have launched if Thom wasn’t a curious welder. “When he started in welding, he listened to what the welding engineers were saying,” Teresa said, adding that he did that for more than a dozen years before launching his own business in the garage. With a background in banking, Teresa soon joined to run the financial end of the business.

Superior Joining began as a precision welding operation that also managed a network of subcontractors. Thom not only welded but also managed the quality inspection, documentation, and certifications as required by various aerospace and defense industry standards like Nadcap and SAE International. The nature of this work requires attention to detail, a creative mind, and, not least, a curiosity about how things are made and problems are solved.

“I remember we’d talk about manufacturing at the dinner table,” Teresa said, “visit other manufacturers, and talk with people who were excited about making what they were making. They were family-owned businesses like us.”

Superior Joining has extensive in-house capabilities now, including microwelding, laser welding, and multiaxis laser cutting. But those visits to manufacturing partners continue, and connections continue to be made.

“We have to learn new technology,” Teresa said. “When we started 28 years ago, wire EDM wasn’t common. Laser was an old technology even then, but it wasn’t adapted into our kind of manufacturing processes. Now we have robots and automated cells. So we have to reinvent our business [around the technology]. We’re change agents, and that bleeds out into the community as we train people to come work with us.”

Fabricating a Better World

Last year Ronald Keizer, president of USA Dutch, a custom metal fabricator in Graham, N.C., and the shop’s HR manager visited a production employee’s house with a card that everyone in his shop had signed. The production employee had terminal cancer.

“It had been a while since we were in contact with him,” Keizer recalled. “He was there with his wife, and they were so grateful that we made the effort to do that for him. That was Friday, and on Monday his wife called to tell us he had died over the weekend. Even then, that small gesture really had a big impact on her, because we showed how much we cared about him as a person.”

Signed cards aren’t unusual in the working world, of course, but the reaction—the fact that those signatures from USA Dutch employees meant so much to both the employee and his wife—isn’t so common. And it likely stems from the shop’s culture.

Keizer, Operations Manager Jeff Albaugh, and the rest of the USA Dutch management team have spent a lot of time analyzing the culture, essentially asking, What exactly makes a culture good, and what kind of culture do we want? Again, it’s grounded in a curiosity that goes beyond the sheet metal being fabricated on the floor.

“We use our values to fabricate a better world. That’s our purpose,” Keizer said. “A group of about 15 people here came up with that, and it’s a big deal for us. We get people invested and engaged in the fact that sheet metal fabrication is important to the world. We take employees to visit customers, see the products our parts go into, and meet the people who work with them. We make parts for elevators that make tall buildings possible. We make parts for conveyor systems that Amazon uses, so we help make Amazon possible. We make parts for ambulances. We help save lives.”

About Each Other

Those in metal fabrication work for employers ranging from global corporations to small private businesses—and like any other sector, it’s not all great. People have told me (on background, for obvious reasons) of what they felt were toxic work cultures where loyalty and tenure were rewarded above talent and where trust was nonexistent. These environments can fester anywhere, from the largest global OEM to the smallest family job shop.

One shop supervisor told me about a previous experience in which managers installed cameras by every workcell to track productivity, but in an unconstructive, almost accusatory way. If people left their work area too often, managers asked why, but didn’t ask how they could help make their lives easier as front-line workers.

Metal fabrication’s relationship with technology is wide-ranging as well, and much of it hinges on how operations manage change. A new press brake with offline simulation and programming can create an incredibly extensive staged setup across the press brake bed, something that would have been impossible even for the most skilled setup person to create so quickly. So even if a shop has amazing press brake operators, it often makes sense to invest in new technology to stay competitive.

What happens after those shiny new machines are installed? A fabricator theoretically could hire button-pushers who do the bare minimum, read instructions on the screen, and get the job done. Their careers don’t advance, and they really don’t care how the machine does what it does. It’s a job that pays the bills.

Or that operator could be trained to go deeper, learn the simulation software, and discover the “why” behind the decisions the software makes. The operator could undergo extensive cross-training, advance his or her career, and work to create even more value for the company.

The former situation happens, of course—it’s a symptom of the skilled labor crisis the industry has faced for years—but the latter brings people together, creating close professional relationships and even lifelong friends. Over the past 50 years, those relationships have formed the very core of what the FMA and The FABRICATOR magazine are all about.