After growing out of every corner of our current shop, we're finally moving. The new building is bigger, brighter, and — once the dust settles — built around the way we actually work. This is the first in a short series of posts where we'll take you behind the curtain: what the space looked like when we got the keys, what we're changing, and why.
If you've ever walked through a shop mid-renovation, you know it doesn't exactly photograph well. Cable trays half-run, floor patches drying, a pallet of fixtures waiting on the loading dock. But this is the most honest version of a project like this, so we're sharing it as-is.
Why we're moving
The short version: we ran out of room. The longer version is that every expansion we've done in the last [N] years has been incremental — a new VMC squeezed into a corner, an inspection bench where a toolbox used to live, a second CMM sharing space with the shipping area. It worked, but it wasn't how we wanted to work.
When a customer asks us to turn around a short-run job in a week, the thing that slows us down isn't the machines. It's the walk — the physical distance between a raw bar and a finished, inspected, packed part. Laying out a new floor from scratch gives us the chance to shorten that walk for every job we take on.
What the new building gives us:
- More square footage so we can finally stop playing Tetris with pallets.
- A dedicated inspection area with climate control, separated from shop-floor traffic.
- Cleaner material flow — receiving, staging, machining, finishing, QA, shipping, all in the order they actually happen.
- Room to grow without needing to move again next time we add capacity.
Where we are today
Right now we're in the unglamorous phase. The previous tenant left the building in decent shape, but "decent" and "ready for a machine shop" aren't the same thing. Here's roughly what's happened so far:
1. Demo and cleanup. Stripped out the old office partitions, pulled up old flooring where we needed to, and cleaned the slab.
2. Electrical. Pulling new 480V service to the spots where the mills and lathes will land. This is the single longest lead-time item on the whole project.
3. Compressed air and coolant lines. Roughed in along the bay walls so we're not running hoses across traffic lanes.
4. Lighting. Replacing the old fluorescents with high-bay LEDs — a small thing that makes a surprisingly big difference on a setup sheet.
What's next
The next milestone is getting the first machines in place. We're planning to move in phases so we can keep running jobs for customers the entire time — no blackout period, no "we'll get back to you in a month." If you have a part in flight with us, you won't notice anything on your end except, eventually, a new return address.
We'll post another update once the first machine is landed and leveled. If you want to see progress in real time, you can follow along on LinkedIn or get in touch through our contact page.
