Culturally and societally, high school students are pressured to attend a four-year college and pursue a bachelor’s degree, and maybe a master’s degree and beyond to get the best start in life. Almost every teacher and guidance counselor in America follow this conventional wisdom while advising their students. This is understandable because it’s what they know. Academia is their world. 

Unfortunately, following this advice has been financially debilitating for some kids and their parents, putting  them in long-term debt with little to no return on the long-term and extremely expensive educational investment.

Vocational tech schools, trade schools, the military and community colleges offer better options for many of today’s youth in spite of the pressure to conform to academic expectations. Without having family wealth or earning full-boat scholarships, students and their parents must seek financial aid, borrow huge sums, and pay for college even while they are still unsure of a career path. This approach to higher education is unnecessary, and many parents need to wake up about other options for their growing children.

The construction and manufacturing trades pay well from the start and provide practical business experience that college cannot offer. Consider the benefits of a starting job at GMFCo:

• Hands-on technical experience in a high demand industry 
• Get paid while learning valuable skills 
• Vocational Tech classes paid by the company 
• Great benefits such as healthcare, dental, flexible hours and paid vacations 
• Unlimited advancement opportunities 

We are not down on education. Just the opposite as we strongly encourage everyone in our company to continually learn, whether taking outside classes or attending our in-house training on the job. Our point is that education comes in all shapes and sizes and everyone should be able to learn and grow according to what’s best for them. For some, that’s 4, 5 or 6 additional years in college and for many others, great careers begin right out of high school. We’ve had the pleasure of watching people in our company flourish who had previously no means to go to college.

Every child is different so it’s important to work with them closely to discover their talents, interests and best career opportunities. Trade schools and colleges both have advantages. The important thing is understanding their differences concerning time, money and value return. A comprehensive article from Indeed.com discusses the key differences and benefits of each option so whether you’re a student or parent, you can make a more informed decision. 

Lastly, please consider the great earning and growth opportunities at our company or pass it on to someone looking for a job. We’re always looking for people who love to build the things that make the world work!

Before any high-tech products like your phone or laptop can be manufactured to meet the market’s demand, machines need to be manufactured and those machines are a collection of parts. Some of those parts must be large, rigid and unyielding to handle all the friction and pressure of mechanized kinetics, namely the foundations and large frameworks of these machines. Generally speaking, larger parts mean fewer parts and better overall stability.

Consider the precision quality of your phone, tablet, laptop, television or other high-tech device. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? Notice how precise everything fits together geometrically in a sleek, trim, durable unit that can do amazing things.

Foundations for Precision Quality

Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Google, HP, Dell, Motorola and other high-tech manufacturers owe much of the precision quality of their products to the machines and robots that produce them. Foundational to those machines are the frames containing and supporting the working parts.

There can be no precision quality manufacturing without the square, level and rigid properties of the frames. That’s where large part fabricating & machining are crucial and highly valued.

The less movement and vibration machine frames are subject to, the better the machines perform and the longer they last. Larger and fewer parts in a frame assembly reduce friction and movement thereby improving rigidity and durability. Fewer parts also means having fewer things to maintain or fix!

A major portion of our work at GMFCo supports the manufacturing and logistics industries by building frameworks and housings for their machines to perform properly.

Helping Manufacturers & Distributors Meet Demand

GMFCo has specialized in large part fabricating and machining (in part) to supply high-tech equipment manufacturers and others with the structural components needed for their assembly lines and materials handling equipment. We supply machine bases and large frameworks used in many different industries including technology, hardware, construction, food processing, materials handling, warehouse automation, paper processing, printing presses, semiconductor manufacturing and defense contracting to name a few.

Experience Counts

If you can design the machines, then we can manufacture the frames for you. Our large CNC equipment such as 5-axis milling machines and our Quickmill Gantry Machining Centers provide the capabilities to produce the larger, heavier parts, such as large frameworks, needed for most industrial machine building.

We work with all kinds of metals and various grades of each. Whether it’s steel, stainless, copper, aluminum, bronze or even tantalum, we can machine it and form it into the precise shape you need, and in sizes large enough for frame building.

Are your finished products of a consistently high quality that your customers deserve? Remember, where others see problems, we see opportunities!

If you need durable frames or any other large metal parts to support and house the workings of your manufacturing equipment, feel free to call us at 603-889-2600.

Large Machining Supports TV Broadcast Infrastructure and More

Customers come to us with all kinds of manufacturing needs, quite often when a feasible solution is needed for a challenging fabrication requirement. Large metal components must be made in the shapes and sizes that engineered designs call for.

When parts are large, there’s a likelihood that we’ll hear about it thanks to word of mouth and the limited capabilities of other machine shops. Our tag line seems to be self-fulfilling; “Where others see problems, we see opportunities.” And when we see those opportunities, we act!

Investments in large CNC machining and handling equipment that we first made in 1999, and then in 2017 and 2018, have resulted in fulfilling the modernization of the nation’s broadcast infrastructure according to FCC mandates. And these same investments are paying off in other critical manufacturing areas.

Tooled Up for Larger Machining Projects

Part of the first FCC requirement was that TV signals had to go from analog to digital, largely to support high definition television. This meant that all of the antennas used for broadcasting TV signals over the airwaves needed to be replaced coast to coast. GMFCo tooled up to become a major national supplier of the masts used for constructing these antennas.

Another FCC mandate required that UHF (Ultra High Frequency) and VHF (Very High Frequency) signal ranges be sold or transferred to the cellular companies for the bandwidth that can handle 5G mobile technology. As a result, approximately 1,600 broadcast antenna masts needed to be replaced for the signals to be ‘’repacked’’ into a lower, tighter frequency range. Our experience in manufacturing antenna masts for America’s digital TV broadcasting placed us in prime position to help build the foundation that enables 5G technology. This collaborative effort has taken wireless communication to a new level.

The nationwide broadcast communication infrastructure project is nearly complete and our large machining investments are now being deployed in other areas. These include building large architectural metal fabrications, structural building components and making equipment parts that support our troops in the field.

Making a Physical Impact

As a company, we feel a sense of gratitude knowing our work makes a difference in people’s lives across the country. Because of our willingness to invest what it takes to tackle an immediate large metal fabrication challenge, new opportunities to use those investments always seem to open up for us. Word of mouth concerning expanded capabilities in large, complex metal components gets around and new projects come our way.

We more than doubled our large machining capacity over the last decade. Each equipment upgrade and plant expansion was made to fulfill a challenging market need. When you invest for the right reasons with the confidence of further leveraging those investments, you can be better assured of continued growth. This has been our experience ever since our company started in 1975.

Upsizing Careers

GMFCo is a career oriented company. We’re keenly aware of job market challenges which is why we keep investing in the human side of our company as well as the operational. We’re always looking to attract talented and career-minded engineers, machinists, welders, equipment handlers and management people. Most of our team members have been with us more than 10 years which says a lot these days! Please reach out to us if you have any questions about capabilities or careers.