This structural fabricator can’t be pigeonholed

The Mike's Metal Works team on the job site. Company founder Mike Hancock is second from the left.

A welder since his teenage years, Mike Hancock thinks spatially. He sees how one part fits into another, or how a complicated fabrication could be built and fit into an existing structure. He has extreme concentration, be it on the welding arc in front of him or an idea about a new project or product. According to those around him, that concentration never seems to abate.

His family's business, a 32-employee fabricator outside San Diego called (appropriately) Mike's Metal Works (MMW), has evolved to embrace the latest tooling and software, including some newly acquired Wila precision brake tools, as well as sophisticated optical scanners that allow the shop to shorten fabrication and erection times significantly. Hancock and his team also have fully embraced building information modeling (BIM).

At the same time he's never lost his entrepreneurial drive, especially when it comes to designing and fabricating new products. When I sat down with Mike and his wife Jackie in March, both were about to head out to a convention to meet with prospective partners to discuss the potential of a new (and as yet unannounced) product in development.

"My main passion in life is product development," Mike said. "I think about developing new products seven days a week, 24 hours a day. It's my life."

Over the decades Mike and Jackie have built a shop culture that focuses on the long term and asks, "Where does this road lead?" It's not about the next job; it's about what products and tools the fabricator can employ and to make the business better.

At 22 Mike started working with a local apartment builder who saw some talent in the young welder and helped him get his contractor license so he could weld railings and stairways for four apartment buildings going up all at once.

"That was during the early 1980s recession," Mike recalled. "This guy happened to have several apartment complexes being built at once." In Mike's world, things were busier than ever, all while a slowdown pervaded just about everywhere else. When someone asked him about how the recession was affecting him, Mike paused and asked, "What's a recession?"

"I was just a kid, really," Mike recalled, adding that he remembers he was just too busy to pay attention. He had apartment stairwells to fabricate, and he was learning as he went. "I just kept going. The recession didn't affect me because, literally, I didn't know it was there."

In the 1980s a man with a thick accent from another hemisphere walked into Mike's shop—then just a small garage in El Cajon, Calif., just east of San Diego—and said he was looking for a welder. The man didn't need anything complicated, just a shade canopy for his backyard. So Mike obliged. He rolled some tubing and welded giant washers on the end. Over the next few months the man kept returning and asking for more welding work related to those odd-looking shade canopies.

Mike thought nothing of it—just someone from the neighborhood who apparently enjoyed shade—until the man came in one day and told him, "You passed the test."

Mike Hancock assists Travis Green with the forming of an aluminum panel.

"What test are we talking about?" Mike asked.

The South African turned out to be an inventor of conveyor belt-scraping technology. He was biding time until his noncompete agreement ran out for a prior invention that he sold to another company. During those weeks, the man was seeing how easy Mike was to work with and testing his fabrication skills.

As Mike recalled, "All he was doing was looking for someone to help fabricate his next invention," which essentially presented a new way to scrape and remove material from a moving conveyor. "He told me, ‘You passed the test, and now I’m going to tell you why I’m really here.’ I said, ‘OK,’ thinking that this really wasn't for real. Well, he did turn out to be the real deal. And we spent five years working on this project. At the end of the fifth year, he did $20 million in sales for his product alone."

"So many things in this world move material on a conveyor belt," said Jackie, who joined the business around this time. "It was a learning experience for us. So many forms of manufacturing, from food processing to sand, have a conveyor belt that moves material, and they have to get material off it. It really blew us away. We learned about industries that we didn't even know existed."

Those conveyor-based industries helped the Hancocks grow the business in a big way. The gentleman from South Africa eventually sold his invention to a conveyor OEM, but by that time, Mike's Metal Works Inc. had developed a diverse revenue stream. It had grown into a known entity in the San Diego area, especially for architectural railings and miscellaneous fabrication, as well as light structural work. The shop invested in more welders, more welding machines, ironworkers, and tube benders.

As Jackie recalled, "Mike started gaining a reputation with area contractors, because they could come to him with an idea, and Mike could spatially realize whatever it was they were thinking of." The projects could involve custom homes or difficult spiral staircases balanced on a slope that, at first glance, was not a place a spiral staircase would work. "But Mike would see it and make it work."

The two brought on more welders and fabricators and more people who knew the complexities of bidding in construction. This started a cycle of more construction projects, including more industrial complexes, that needed more talent and technology, which in turn brought in more projects.

Mike wasn't really looking to move the business, but a friend in commercial real estate had a building for sale. It had 50,000 square feet under roof and a 60-acre lot—huge for a property near San Diego. Mike still wasn't interested, but his friend insisted, so he drove out to have a look.

"As soon as I saw it, I called my wife," Mike recalled. "I said, ‘You have to take a look at this.’"

The building's first occupant helped usher in the era of modern aviation. Almost 100 years ago Harlan Fowler invented the Fowler flap, a retractable flap you can still see on many modern aircraft. "We now work in a place that's part of aviation history," Jackie said.

An installer aligns the end flanges on 16-gauge aluminum panels that make up the standing-seam roof spanning a serpentine walkway.

After the property bubble had burst in 2008 and 2009, opportunity arose for companies like Mike's Metal Works, and in 2014 the couple took the leap. As Jackie recalled, "We saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We could actually afford [the Fowler building], and we had a few bucks in the bank. We could really do this. We thought, ‘This opportunity might not present itself again. When the economy improves, the price of this place will double or triple.’ So we went for it."

With more space, the company began filling it with equipment, including a 141-foot-long Lincoln Electric PythonX® beam line, complete with a 7-axis robotic plasma cutting system. Plate cutting and fabrication equipment came soon after, including a Messer cutting table with a 5-axis beveling plasma head hooked to a Hypertherm power source.

When Mike visited a retirement home and saw the location of the planned walkway remodel, he foresaw serious challenges. The contractor wanted a standing-seam roof, which on its own is nothing out of the ordinary. But, the company would need to invest in a shear and press brake, along with some good tooling to meet the application requirements. It would push Mike's Metal Works beyond ornamental, architectural, and structural fabrication and into the sheet metal business.

Mike decided to take the leap. His business purchased a 12-ft., 250-ton Accurpress press brake and invested in precision tooling from Wila.

Still, the job wasn't simple. The standing-seam roof wasn't a rectangular system with conventional panels. Instead, the roof sheltered a serpentine walkway for 2,600 linear ft., weaving almost half a mile through the retirement complex. This called for a series of 6-ft.-long, 16-gauge aluminum panels in an unusual configuration around the curves, which required various trapezoidal shapes. Panels toward the inside radius of a curve narrowed, while those extending toward the curve's outside radius broadened. And many of these shapes are subtle, particularly when they’re part of a large, sweeping curve in the walkway. Some panels have sides that are just a few degrees off from being exactly parallel—but still, they’re not parallel.

This meant that panels needed to be assembled in a specific order around each curve. Put the wrong panel in the wrong place, and the entire curve would be off. Obviously, this wasn't your standard standing-seam install job. Add all this to the standard forms required for a standing seam—a 90-degree flange followed by hems so the panels can be interlocked—and you have a trial-by-fire introduction to the sheet metal business.

The panel ends form a fascia that overhangs on each side. It has a conventional 90-degree bend followed by a return flange and, at the very end, another open hem bent to 160 degrees.

"This built rigidity into the structure, and it allowed us to connect the piece to another piece of aluminum that wasn't visible," Mike said, adding that the fascia portion was both geometrically and cosmetically critical. If they didn't line up just so, the fascia elements couldn't be connected as designed.

"This is where the precision tooling was critical, and the machine had to be calibrated just right," Mike said. "If you don't get the open hem correct, it's either going to be too loose or too tight. If it's too tight and you overbend the hem, and it's now closer to a teardrop shape, you cannot get that panel over the 1-in. lip of the next panel. And getting out a hammer [to make it fit] really doesn't work well with aluminum."

He added that consistent grain direction was also key. Inconsistent grain directions within a batch of parts often led to forming inconsistencies, particularly if an operator bent a batch of blanks without paying attention to the material grain. "Again, the material, tooling, and the machine setup needs to be just right," Mike said. "We’re trying to set up our guys in the field for success rather than failure."

This standing-seam roof required precision forming and careful installation. Misplacing one piece throws off the entire roof structure.

The job required segmented tools both on the top and bottom, to give clearance when forming the positive and negative flanges, as well as a 0.5-in. hemming tool.

The brake tooling purchase effectively gave Mike another set of tools to grow the business and kicked his idea generation up a notch. "It just opens up so many different directions for my thinking," he said. "I figure out one forming technique, and that in turn leads me to the next project and a new design. I think, ‘I’ve got this tooling, and I want to do this project. Can I get it done? Or will this product work with different brake tools?’ It opens up an entirely new door. Heck, I’m thinking about the potential all the time. I can't go to sleep."

"I figured it out!"

That phrase has awoken Jackie in the wee hours literally dozens of times over her years of marriage. It's Mike, finally seeing the solution to a problem. "He does strange things that other people can't do," Jackie said, "especially when there's no plan, or if an architect brings something up and nobody can figure out how to do it."

Seconds later, Mike leaps out of bed, grabs a sketch pad and writes it all down before he forgets, then returns to bed. "But then I usually can't go back to sleep, so I’ll just go to work even at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning." It's difficult to let such a eureka moment pass.

A recent eureka moment entailed a product that involved some of the shop's newly purchased Wila gooseneck punches, which again broaden the palette of sheet metal forming possibilities for a host of different products—some of which Mike and Jackie hope to offer soon via a consumer-direct online store through a subsidiary called MMW Products. (Mike's Metal Works Inc., long known in the area's construction industry, continues to focus on structural and architectural fabrication.)

MMW Products, along with a host of projects carried out by Mike's Metal Works, started with an idea. Whether the project calls for new brake tools or an entirely new approach to an old product or problem, those eureka moments are driving MMW forward.

In 1990 Mike Hancock walked into his wife's office with a beige box with a screen—an early Macintosh. Big corporations had used computers for years by then, but the tech hadn't necessarily penetrated the small-fab-shop market. At the time companies like San Diego-based Mike's Metal Works were largely paper-based businesses.

In a previous life, Jackie had worked for a company that cut vinyl lettering in the sign industry, and its machines happened to be controlled by a Mac. Of course, she had never used the thing for any office application.

"I remember him saying, ‘I don't know what this is, but I know that we need it, and I know it's going to be the wave of the future.’"

Jackie Hancock, CEO, has worked with her husband Mike, company president, for decades, joining MMW when Mike was working out of a small garage outside San Diego.

Fast-forward to 2019, and Mike's Metal Works employees now embrace digital technology, including 3D scanning and building information modeling (BIM). Recently the company dove further into the digital realm and purchased a Trimble TX8 3D scanning system, along with Trimble's Tekla modeling system for detailing and FabSuite (another Trimble brand) for overall job management.

Historically, structural fabrication has dealt with the perennial challenges of variation between the drawing and the actual building. The two are never the same. Decades ago Mike would go on-site and conduct the measurements manually—a long, tedious process.

Today the company performs detailing in Tekla, then takes a 3D scanner to the construction site or other job site, scans the building, drops it into the 3D shop model, and makes any necessary adjustments.

Jackie chimed in. "Nobody pours concrete exactly the way they say they will, and elevator shafts are never exactly plumb."

Much of the sheet metal work at MMW requires open hems that require careful forming. Too closed and the panels don't lock together; too open, and the components fall apart.