Mestek Machinery Delivers Innovative Cost Solutions
Mestek Machinery Delivers Innovative Cost Solutions
The Mestek Machinery story began in 1964 when Mestek acquired Peterson Roll Feed Company. It was later merged into Cooper-Weymouth in 1974 and wasn’t until the 1990s that the company made plans to better serve metal forming companies.
Today, the Mestek family of metal forming manufacturing brands includes Lockformer, Iowa Precision, Engel and Roto-Die, bringing together well over 100 years of experience addressing every facet of the duct industry.
“Our job today more so than any other is to produce labor saving solutions for the industry,” said Michael Bailey, Mestek’s Senior Vice President of Sales. “As stewards of mechanical contractors, sheet metal contractors and duct fabricators, we’re continuously coming up with innovative solutions to make those jobs easier.”
A top-of-the-line, “game-changing” product available to contractors that helps minimize duct leakage is the Pro-Fabriduct Full Coil Line by Iowa Precision. The line leverages footprint, speed and production rates along with tolerances that no other HVAC coil line in the industry today can match.
“Duct leakage is the biggest buzzword in the duct world. This line has so many features that lend itself to less chance of duct leakage,” Bailey said, noting SMACNA developed a resource a few years ago for leakage testing. “We were consistently coming up with 25-30% less chance of duct leakage using this new Fabriduct line.”
As a market leader in HVAC sheet metal equipment and solutions, Mestek operates with a long-term outlook … and that means staying on top of the latest trends.
“Two big trends we’ve been watching recently are prefabrication, which we first saw at a Bay Area contractor’s facility and now it’s being applied all over the country,” Bailey said. “The second is digital transformation. Everything’s going paperless.”
During the pandemic, all industries — including sheet metal — were forced to adopt digital technologies and solutions to make it through years of global uncertainty. Several Mestek product lines, like Lockformer’s Vulcan Laser-Max laser cutting system and spiral tube formers, offer the benefit of ethernet connectivity to perform remote self-diagnostics.
“We can support those machines from remote locations. We even installed machines online during COVID because we couldn’t visit,” Bailey said. “We had to change our mindset a little bit, and I give my team all the credit in the world. But this is very much a face-to-face industry, and we went back to in-person once COVID restrictions were lifted.”
Bailey, who has built countless valuable relationships with contractors during his 27-year tenure, is proud of his company’s designation as SMACNA National’s first Premier Partner program member in 2014.
“The Premier Partner program was introduced to me as a way to meet company owners, to network and to make Mestek Machinery more visible across the entire country,” Bailey said. “It took a couple years to really get relationships going, but it’s been worth its weight in gold in terms of meeting contractors and their families. They’ve met my family too. It makes it so much easier to do business by knowing people on a personal level.”
Bailey and his team love being involved in local SMACNA chapters, like Bay Area. One of his passions, and what keeps him coming to work day after day, is making sure contractors are educated on all the options available to them. That’s why training is so important.
“That’s our job,” he said. “If the contractor doesn’t know more than he did before we got there, we haven’t done our job.”