Photos: Maker Industries
What do professional wakeboarding
and one-off design and custom fabrication have in common?
No, that’s not a trick question
and if you’ve said “nothing at all,” that’s completely understandable. But they do have something in
common, quite a bit actually, namely a certain level of fearlessness and stick-to-itiveness. How else can you
explain that Christopher Guard went from professional wakeboarder to master fabricator and builder
with nothing but sheer dedication and learning on the job.
School? Just the one of hard knocks.
“I spent at least as much on learning from my mistakes as I would have on any formal education,” Guard says with a laugh. “But that’s OK, I love the challenge and I love what we do.”
Guard grew up in Milton, went to school there, but spent nearly as much time in Gravenhurst in the summer, weekends and holidays and family get-togethers.
“We were cottagers and we spent a lot of time up there, which is how I got started in wakeboarding,” he says.
As to the business, Guard says he fell into that in a roundabout kind of way.
“Through high school and most of my 20s I was a professional wakeboarder. We also travelled to Florida later on in my career for training. I was pretty serious about the sport and it was through that that I eventually transitioned into the industry.”
Guard says that as a rider he had endorsements and access to different brands, everything from clothing to beer companies and eyewear etc. They sponsored events and tournaments and for these action sports and events it also required building weird obstacles and features.
“So I would help build some of these and that, over time, transitioned into a company – action sport marketing – and what we were doing for these events was basically building the required infrastructure. If a company wanted to brand any of these obstacles for any given event, we would build what they needed.”
However, in 2008, Guards says he got out of that business to start working with a friend’s carpentry crew building homes and cottages.
But he couldn’t really leave his old life behind.
“What happened was that many of my contacts from before kept reaching out to see if I could still build them things,” he says. “The first thing I remember was a huge Plinko board. They didn’t know where to get something like that and asked if I had any ideas, so I said I could build it for them.
“That’s when I started making and building stuff in my backyard in Toronto and it just grew from there.
“That Plinko board was for a movie launch and that turned into the same client calling back every two to three weeks with another request. It was always something that was unique and different that you couldn’t just go out and buy.”
So Guard’s backyard turned into his quasi workshop, as different brands kept calling him because they needed something they just couldn’t get.
“It was always random things, or something weird and unusual they couldn’t find anywhere and I just kept making them.
“That’s how I got started, through my old contacts and it just grew outside the sporting industry.”
Guard says he was doing that for a couple of years, but it was quite miserable at times, “especially in the winter as you can imagine, so then I transitioned to working out of a shared space, a workshop from 2011 to 2012.”
Throughout it all, family members and friends would help out as needed, but mostly I was doing everything by myself.
“When I got started my dad (Wayne) used to help me out quite a bit. He is an engineer; he came up with the solar roller for pools and patented it. So he was great helping me with building and designing some of these items. I was still building the stuff for the action sports and he would fly out and help me build those features and more than once he’d come to the backyard and give me a hand.”
But after a couple of years, Guard decided he had to get his own space, because running a business from a shared space like that just doesn’t work. As a result he moved into his first shop, about 2,500 sq. ft, in 2013.
“And we’ve only moved just once since then, and the shop we’re still in is just shy of 20,000 sq. ft. with five to seven employees. We scale up and down as needed.”
Guard is married to his wife Jessica. She works as a graphic designer with brands and their creative direction, and “that’s actually quite good because we have the same vocabulary when it comes to our jobs. There is a lot of crossover there and we know what the other is talking about.”
Starting outGuard says when he started out it was with little more than a basic contractor kit and a bunch of hand tools.
But over the years he has always reinvested into the business and by now they have a pretty serious arsenal of machinery, millions of dollars worth.
From a large table saw to CNC laser cutters and wide format and 3D printers, Guard says they’re ready to build just about anything.
It all started out as a kind of woodworking shop, but as the scope of their projects grew, so did their shop. Actually you could say there really are three shops now. Woodworking, metal and printing.
Guard says he got to this point because each year he looked at where the pain points were, what they had to outsource, and if it made sense for them they bought the missing piece of equipment to give them the ability to do it in-house the next time.
“So over the years, we have gone from making simple signs to building entire retail stores. Now we are a fully equipped shop that can handle everything from metal to wood and printing. The only thing we outsource now is powder coating.
“We’ve got an AXYZ 8 foot by 20 foot CNC router bed with full auto tool changing, a 10-foot Felder table saw, and a Felder edgebander.
“For our metal shop, which I would describe as medium to light fabrication, nothing structural or heavy gauge. We’re into quarter inch and less. We have a CNC plasma cutter, CNC press break (7-axis), and we have cold saws and band saws, a horizontal band saw, MIG welders and TIG welders.
“And in our print shop we have a Roland wide printer, vinyl cutter and a few laminators to put protective film on what we produce. And our newest addition is an HP R1000 belt-fed flatbed printer. So now we can print directly to rigid materials up to 5-½ feet wide and unlimited length.
“We can print on plastic, wood and everything in between. And of course 3D printing is also utilized when needed.
“We deploy the 3D printer when we need a shape that just doesn’t lend itself to manufacturing. With this we can get these very complex shapes by just clicking print. It’s not fast, but it gets it done.”
From design to fabricationToday, Maker Industries prides itself in being master builders and fabricators that use “state of the art machinery, digital equipment and imagination to create custom assets for various clients.”
By using cutting-edge design and manufacturing software to bring clients ideas to life, the company can turn napkin drawings into polished renderings and concepts into manufacturable parts.
Guard says Maker Industries is a “single point of contact for businesses with a broad range of production needs and they specialize in helping brands and their diverse manufacturing demands.
Their list of services is impressive including, but not limited to:
- Consultation
- Research and development
- 3D design
- Fabrication in any medium
- CNC cutting
- CNC metal forming
- 3D CNC milling
- Thermoforming
- Laser cutting
- 3D printing
- Rotational molding
- Arduino and wiring solutions
- Software development
- Circuit design
- Commercial construction
- Storefront facades
Examples of their work include everything from a 15 ft. goose on wheels, gigantic “Lite Brites,” to a 6 ft.-tall functioning smartphone, calculators and talking ATM machines. They have also built entire retail store interiors, storefront facades and sporting venue interiors across Canada and the U.S.
Steep learning curveGuard is completely self-taught and there were some steep learning curves over the years.
“You pay for the education one way or the other,” Guard says. “And time, we are talking tens of thousands of hours.
I am always, and even still today – I was here until 9 o’clock last night – figuring out how to make something we agreed to make.”
And of course pricing – early on in his career – was a huge challenge.
“When I started, I had no idea how to price some projects and it was tough in those early days. Sometimes I took an absolute bath, because before I could even think of putting the right price on something I first had to figure out how to make it.
“Now of course I can look at a rendering and I know what it will take, for time and materials and actual build. So now it’s OK, but that was a steep learning curve also.”
One of their recent projects had them build an ATM that dispenses dog treats when a dog walks up to it. So, to build that, they had to build the electronics from scratch and write original software to make it all work.
“Everything on that project was completely custom, from scratch. We even had to build our own circuit boards,” Guard says.
In a world where most companies specialize and find their niche, Maker Industries has taken the exact opposite approach.
“Our specialty really is the complicated,
one-of-a-kind item.
I can say that if somebody can dream it up,
we can figure out how to make it.”
Most of their projects are a combination of the three main shop areas, so woodworking/millwork, metal work and printing.
“When it comes to millwork, that end of the business is growing, but we also design to our capabilities.
So if a client comes with a rendering or image of what they want to achieve, they are looking to us to help them turn that into a reality,” Guard says.
“And we get there by using what we have at our disposal. So often it’s a full mix of what we can do. We may suggest doing the substructure in wood and then clothing it in metal. And then instead of a custom-mixed paint, we can do a vinyl wrap, which is quicker and more affordable. We offer solutions in line with our experience and capabilities.
“If I had to put a number on it, I would say we are pretty evenly spread between millwork, metal and print.
“And part of that is by design, because that way I’m keeping all parts of the shop busy. So if needed, if the metal shop is slammed, then we might for example utilize millwork for the framing. Or we utilize tube steel if the wood side is crazy busy”.
All of the work is absolutely, 100 per cent, word of mouth. It’s a big industry, but it is also small enough that word gets around pretty quick.
“People know that we can figure it out and get it done. I am the solution to their problems and that is a good place to be,” he says.
“ We are a solution-based company. Whether that is curating the talent to get it done or doing it ourselves.”
