Welders stay on the job in down times

Randy Gingras had to make a choice in December: He could either lay off a couple of dozen welders, or he could pay them to build him a couple of palm trees from which he could hang his hammock.

"What can I say?" Gingras shrugged with a grin Friday. "I like hammocks."

But the tall, soft-spoken man really isn't eccentric, nor is the businessman all that thrilled about lounging back at work in a dangling net.

Gingras, the CEO and general manager of Legacy Steel, is finding ways to justify keeping all of his employees through recent slow times. He can't imagine letting his late father's 50-year-old metal fabricating business shatter under the current crashing economy.

"I like these guys," he said of his employees. "I've just had to figure out ways to keep them around."

So two dozen welders are busy taking scrap metal from the business' Salt Lake City steel yard and constructing a Hawaiian beach scene, complete with a hut, wildflowers, a tribal-styled bridge and towering palm trees.

"The whole thing started when I was asking staff how I could hang my hammock in the shop, since I live in Hawaii," Gingras said. "The next thing we knew we were bringing Hawaii to Utah."

Crews of welders worked away in separate teams Friday afternoon in their spacious, 18,000-square-foot shop. Each person or team was in charge of crafting a different element of a perhaps rustier and stiffer tropical landscape than the one Gingras sees when he flies home every month.

But it's clear that building beach-worthy flora and blossoms from cold hard steel is no sissy work.

Wearing scruffy overalls and a tattered leather apron, David Dyson, 52, was banging away at his assigned tropical element, a leaf. He secured the 7-foot-long flat palm in his table vise, then twisted and pounded at the steel foliage until it took a more natural shape.

The trunk of one tree is made from 980 separately welded plates.

Dyson, who was described by a coworkers as "the detail man," said he's not only happy to still have a job in such hard times, but he's going to be disappointed when the economy picks up and the crew has to go back to working mundane steel.

He smiled like a kid at play, then took off his safety glasses to reveal oval clean spots in the middle of his dirty face. "If you can see it, I think I can make it," he nodded. "I just look at a picture and give it a go."

Nearby, 22-year-old Hector Borjas squinted into the screen on a $60,000 computerized plasma steel torch and pushed start. Bubbles gurgled from beneath a steel plate, and a robotic arm went cutting out another leaf with its 30,000-degree torch.