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Being greeted by a WWII bomber hanging on the wall of a machine shop is not a typical experience for even the most grizzled industry reporter. Nor is climbing a stepladder to capture the flames roaring out of a 10-foot-tall metal dragon sculpture. You might have petted a stingray before, but you’ve never played a drum solo in a full-blown recording studio tucked into a shop’s corner.

But what about the array of high-end, palletized HMCs, VMCs, and multitasking machines in the next room? And what are those three blacksmiths making over there? Why are two gentlemen filing metal dies edges by hand in the dark?

Did you just stumble into a playground for artistic gearheads or a sophisticated high-mix manufacturing facility?

The answer here is yes — “here” being Marathon Precision, an all-in-one machine shop and metalworking facility located inconspicuously in the outer Chicago suburb of Wheeling, Illinois.

By the end of the tour, you realize the coolest thing about Marathon Precision isn’t the recording studio or mechanical sculptures or even the back room full of classic muscle cars. It is that their coexistence under one roof serves a rather profound purpose: A drastically improved bottom line for the business.  

Still, you might wonder: Was that the point of fusing art and creativity with a variety of production methods? Was it an offbeat strategy to create a loyal workforce, or was it simply the byproduct of one man’s unbridled imagination?

The answer again is yes — both are true. This is the story of how art, generosity, creativity and technology came together to create a fun, profitable, highly efficient one-stop-shop.

A Vision Forged From Dies

The story begins 40 years ago in a technical high school classroom in Chicago, where young Mike Bauer — grandson of a blacksmith and son of a busy mother of six and a father who flew bombing raids over Nazi Germany during WWII — is learning to shape steel by hand. “I remember in one of those shop classes, the first thing they gave us was a block of steel and a file to square it up,” he says in his deadpan Chicago drawl. “I thought: ‘I’m never going to do this for a living.’”

Those classes soon led to Bauer’s first job at a local shop where he learned foundry work and gained hands-on experience with tool-and-die-making. He took to these skills immediately. He seemed to be gifted with a sixth sense for detecting minute variations in steel and forging edges much sharper than his coworkers.

Over the years while honing his craft at shops around town, Bauer took on greater and greater levels of responsibility. He found himself as a department lead, being praised for his ability to integrate processes while keeping costs in check and attracting a diverse array of customers.

But after years serving other shops, dealing with management conflicts, cold-hearted bosses and secretly harboring a desire for autonomy, Bauer struck out on his own. As fate would have it, he opened Marathon Precision in the summer of 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks and subsequent anthrax scares. Still, with just a short list of equipment and his conviction that in-house, end-to-end approaches are how you succeed in a competitive landscape, work began to ramp up. He secured contracts with major packaging and labeling companies — his dies today produce many of the envelopes and paper packages we receive every day — objective validation of his one-stop-shop strategy. 

How “Overbuying” Became a Winning Strategy

To bolster his shop’s forging and die-making capabilities, Bauer quickly added manual grinding and other secondary processes. From the outset, Bauer made a calculated decision to “overbuy” — both in terms of floor space (60,000 square feet today) and equipment — an unorthodox approach that demanded reinvesting nearly all profit straight back into the shop.

Bauer’s earliest forays into CNC machining began as demand grew for more complex shapes and tighter tolerances. When a key customer requested turned features on a stainless part, he invested in his first CNC lathe almost immediately — without a multi-year contract or a backlog of similar orders. That move showed his bias for “buying before needing,” which he continued by investing in Sodick VMCs and palletized Matsuura HMCs for rapid changeovers — both critical to the shop’s high-mix, low-volume operations. He also snapped up one of the first Haas five axis machines as soon as it hit the market, deploying in-process probes and on-machine inspection routines early on — both uncommon at the time for smaller shops. Within a few years, CNC machining was no longer just a side benefit but a primary revenue driver. The shop now boasts more than 50 CNC machines, including palletized Matsurra HMCs that perform lights-out, a full lathe department (manual to 10-axis CNC lathes), OD grinders, surface grinders, Mazak Integrex multispindles, chemical milling equipment, high precision Sodick mills, Sodick wire and sinker EDMs, waterjet and laser-cutting machines.

When producing dies, the blacksmiths hammer wedge-shaped cross-sections, focusing their work on high-stress zones. Once the raw shape is complete, the cutting edges are hand-filed, checking tolerances through measurements and by feel. Doing this work in a dark room allows the craftsmen to see minute reflections on the steel. Their hand-filing motions are methodical and precise, resulting in cutting edges so sharp that Bauer says they can easily cut through two-and-a-half inches of paper. To back up his claim, he takes a thick leather glove from a workbench and runs it over the edge of a newly sharpened die. It cuts through the leather like a hot knife through butter.

While the forging and hand-filing areas are set apart from the machining department, a data-driven rigor still informs the workflow. Drawings are developed from digital files, and final tolerances are often validated with a Keyence VL-700 3D scanner. This investment, it turns out, opened yet another tier of high-value work to the shop. 

Scanning for Success: A Rapid Inspection Loop

Keyence VL-700 Series 3D scanners are equipped with what the company calls “the world’s first fully automatic CAD conversion function.” Its “true-to-life scanning” allow these machines to obtain 3D data with shape and color (“heat map”) information, and CAD data and coordinates can be used to perform comparative measurements. While not ideal for some high-precision parts, the key advantage of the optical scanner, at least at Marathon Precision, is its ability to quickly scan and compare a part to the model used to machine it.

While the Keyence represented a major investment for Marathon Precision, it was triggered by just one particularly urgent case: New work for a potentially major customer that required complex aluminum components with extensive geometric features. The turnaround time? A few weeks. Searching for a solution, Bauer called Keyence and asked for a demo of the machine. After the demonstration, he says, he purchased the scanner immediately. “I would never have taken that job otherwise,” he says.

Mike Foy, Marathon’s lead production engineer, explains that any errors and misalignments, even for difficult-to-measure features like fillets, countersinks or concentricity, are easily spotted in the heat map. Other advantages of the scanner, according to Foy: Very little training is required to properly scan a part and compare, and no programming of GD&T information is required. Simply scan and compare, knowing that the accuracy of the comparison can be easily changed. This means that machinists can quickly check an incomplete part after the first operation to ensure accuracy — ideal for the shop’s low-volume production focus.

“We used to rely heavily on more traditional quality control methods,” Foy says, “but a tactile CMM takes considerable knowledge and time to program. With the Keyence, we can scan parts mid-process and catch issues before we’ve made a hundred of them. We get a precise digital model that feeds back to the machining team.”

“Once you have advanced inspection in-house,” Bauer adds, “you don’t hesitate when a tough job comes your way. That’s really where we’ve been able to grow.”

The Full Circle: A Mechanical Playground and Manufacturing Powerhouse

By the time you leave Marathon Precision, the question you had at the beginning of the tour is largely answered. Yes, this place is a mechanical playground inspired by one man’s imagination, and yes, it’s also an intricately structured operation that thrives on technical prowess and the free sharing of innovative ideas.

The WWII bomber fuselage, the flame-shooting Batman symbol, the vintage baby-blue ’55 Chevy on the wall, and the scores of glowing vintage signs aren’t just there to dazzle visitors. They are a testament to history and daily reminder that design, craft, and artistry are as critical to US manufacturing as process optimization or rapid inspection cycles.

Years ago, while working under two co-owners with starkly different leadership styles, Bauer witnessed an incident that nearly killed a young machinist. The machinist had pushed a CNC mill far beyond its recommended speed, causing a large steel part to break free and blow the door completely off its hinges. The door knocked the young man backwards onto a table while the part shot over his head and into the back wall. One boss rushed over, asking if the machinist was all right and calling for an ambulance. The other boss picked up the machine’s door to inspect the damage. “That was the day I decided which one I wanted to be,” Bauer says. Safety protocols are part of routine training, and also checked each morning and afternoon when Bauer walks the shop floor to greet his employees.

So yes, the dragon and Batman and vintage signs and the real-life GTA garage full of muscle cars are visually spectacular. But combined with Bauer’s leadership, their presence also cultivates a work environment where creativity and mechanical tinkering are not just tolerated, but encouraged. Old and new technologies complement each other and foster a diverse range of skills among staff. Here, a blacksmith hand-forging dies or an operator making weekend car repairs is no less valid than programming a five-axis CNC or verifying a new part’s geometry.

Most of the higher-level production jobs at Marathon Precision are staffed internally by people who receive training. Tinkering and sculpting and working on cars all feeds into that system. “I think it’s good if somebody wants to come in and work on their cars,” Bauer says. “There are three or four of us here that know a lot about cars. And if it’s a mechanical part, we can make it here. We can make anything and teach anybody here. If it’s mechanical, it’s good, because it does one big thing for you: It builds knowledge.”

And that’s how we end the tour, with Bauer pointing out all the side projects currently underway inside this nondescript building in a sleepy Chicago suburb. There’s the actual moat that his son, Marathon’s vice president Mike Bauer Jr., is building around the perimeter of a new conference room. There’s the giant spider sculpture situated next to “Buzz,” the metal dragonfly. “There’s a guy building a motorcycle back there,” Bauer points out along a near wall. “He has one on the other side of the wall that he already finished. And when you show people that, people want it. I believe people want — they want a better life. They want to make more.”