What Drives a One-Man Machining Operation?

What drives someone to risk it all, taking out loans and hunting down space and equipment to start their own machine shop? According to Mason Montalvo, founder and owner of Montalvo Machine in Statham, Georgia, it’s simple. “It’s the challenge,” he says. “I just want to do it to say that I can.”

Mason Montalvo shows off the steady rest he designed and built. Like most of his projects, he designed the rest in Autodesk before machining each of the parts himself. While he says he went a little overboard in designing it, the desire to launch himself into projects like this is what ultimately led him to start his own company. Source: Eli Plaskett

Like many people in the metalworking industry, Montalvo got his start at a local machine shop, a manufacturer in Gainsville, Georgia. He was just out of high school, where he learned CAD skills using Autodesk Inventor, and followed a friend’s advice on where to apply. “I didn’t even know what a machine shop was,” he says. “I thought I was going to work on cars.” While working at the machine shop, Montalvo attended welding school and learned machining on the job. “I learned on a lathe and mill with no readouts,” he explains. “I had to learn to do it the old way.”

Featured Content

When Will We See Humanoid Robots on the Manufacturing Floor? READ MORE

DN Solutions and HELLER: A United Vision for U.S. Manufacturing Renewal READ MORE

Addressing Manufacturing Challenges with Automation READ MORE

After his crash course in the old school, Montalvo moved on to other manufacturing jobs, working as a pipe welder and then as a welder at a large fabrication company near Athens, Georgia. “I was the only welder who knew how to operate a lathe or a mill,” he says, “so instead of asking the machinists to add parts I needed for weldments, I’d just hop on a machine that wasn’t in use and make it myself.”

Today, Montalvo owns his own shop, where he gets to indulge the impulse to do everything himself every single day.

Going Overboard

Montalvo Machine is a small, one-room machine shop that Montalvo had purpose-built with space for an office on the second floor. On the main floor, he performs most machining operations on manual machine tools — namely a LeBlond lathe and a secondhand Vectrax mill. “Learning old school machining when I was younger was a big help,” he says. “It makes it a lot easier to set up a small shop like this.” That said, his Vectrax is not entirely without luxuries like the digital readouts on the X and Y axes, as well as the axial drive motors on the X, Y and Z axes.

In addition to machining parts, Montalvo puts his welding skills to use. When he began the shop, much of the early work was in producing commercial hand rails, but now he receives orders for a variety of short-run parts, which is how he likes it. “It’s fun being able to solve new problems every day,” he says.

For example, one longer turned part required a steady rest, but the ones that met Montalvo’s needs fell outside his budget. “I thought, ‘Why would I spend $7,000 on a rest I can make myself?’” he explains. Montalvo designed the entire thing in Autodesk Fusion, with some parts having tolerances of 2 or 3 thou. He even modeled the LeBlond’s carriage and ways in Fusion to ensure that the custom rest fit perfectly to the machine. “As it turns out, I probably spent $7,000 just in labor, so I understand why it was so expensive,” he says, laughing. But the resulting rest met his needs perfectly. “I started my business because nobody lets you go overboard when you’re working for them. So I work for myself and go overboard all I want.”

“I started my business because nobody lets you go overboard when you’re working for them. So I work for myself and go overboard all I want.” – Mason Montalvo, Owner of Montalvo Machine

While his love of over-engineering his solutions might not fit in well at larger businesses with overheads that demand stricter adherence to the bottom line, Montalvo’s comprehensive approach toward addressing challenges leads to skillfully engineered solutions for customer challenges.

This motor mount required careful planning to machine each face with multiple features centered on different points along the face, all needing machined in precise relation to each other and to features on the opposite face. Parts like this provide the challenge that Montalvo says made founding his own shop worthwhile. Source: Alfredo Peterson

One part he showed during my visit was a motor mount that connects to a fluid tank. Each side of the workpiece has features centered on the same point offset from the center of the part, as well as features centered on the part center. Machining that on a traditional mill required multiple setups for each part, and correctly zeroing the part relative to the opposite face meant coming up with a clever solution. Montalvo designed and machined a mount using a cutoff from the part stock, enabling him to indicate off the mount to keep each side accurate to the other. “I used the center lines of the holes to find zero,” he explains. “That let me locate features relative to each other and relative to the other face’s features.”

Finding these kinds of creative solutions is part of what drew him to manufacturing, but the freedom to tackle these challenges his own way is what called him to start his own business.

The work/life balance at Montalvo Machine is simple: Work life and home life are interwoven freely. Montalvo designed and built this desk, which he shares with his wife in an office that has room for the kids and a drum kit. Here, he designs parts in Autodesk on a computer he built in a building he helped design where his whole family feels welcome. Source: Alfredo Peterson

More Than a Job

One aspect of the shop that stands out is how readily it reflects Montalvo’s life and passions. His children have bicycle helmets sitting on shelves next to blanks. He works on CAD drawings using a computer he built with toy cars sitting in the casing. “I basically built a high-end gaming PC to run Autodesk,” he says. And that PC sits on an extra-large desk he built and shares with his wife, who works remotely for the Georgia state government. On the other side of the room, he keeps a drum kit, as well as a guitar and amp.

Across the entire facility, he stamps his personality on everything he touches because the impulse to create things on his own terms is simply part of who he is. Speaking to him, you can feel the excitement at the work that carries him to every new job, from the table base he designed and welded together to the hand-operated crane he built to avoid needing to rent a jack for handrail deliveries.

And that excitement matters. While recent years have starkly illustrated how tumultuous the world can be for manufacturers, the manufacturing industry will always be in a state of flux. As technology changes, as older generations retire and new makers step into roles, as social currents push people toward or away from the industry, it will always change. But through these changes, the strength of U.S. manufacturing has always depended on people who, driven by their need to create, provide the skill and time needed to manufacture the world we live in. Businesses close doors, people move on, and new blood with new enthusiasm step in to keep the chips flying.

Montalvo, for his part, loves the work for its own sake. “This is hard,” he says. “I’ve gone through and continue to go through rough times. I’m not in it for the money — I’m in it for the challenge. It’s harder than the money justifies.”