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The story of Marathon Precision 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.’”

Today, Bauer’s shop, , is perhaps one of the most unique and, frankly, inspiring metalworking facilities I’ve ever seen. I could use this space to explain how their team, led by founder and owner Mike Bauer, has smartly integrated old and new metalworking technologies, from blacksmithing to grinding to chemical etching and automated CNC machining. And how they’ve mixed those capabilities with a shop culture where creativity, music, mechanical tinkering and even personal car repair are not only allowed but encouraged. 

I could go further and explain how that shop culture has made Marathon Precision a destination for skilled metalworkers (and I will do this in a subsequent article), but that’s why we created this video. I encourage you to give it a watch. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Mike Bauer (founder, owner of Marathon Precision): There was a TV show, and I forget what the name of it was, but it’s punch line was “it's a curse.” It's a curse, and it's a curse because there's nothing I see that's cool that I don't think we can make. 

Brent Donaldson (editor-in-chief, 91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ): All right, we are just north of Chicago in Wheeling, Illinois. We are at Marathon Precision.

Mike: I think there's 17,300 machine shops in the US right now. I don't know how many are ISO. I don't know how many are as diversified equipment-wise as us. 

Brent: Marathon Precision is a one-stop shop that offers CNC machining, grinding, blacksmithing, chemical machining, EDM.

Mike: And I'm not bragging. I'm trying to help the industry most of the money I make, I put back into the shop.

Brent: And you might look at this inconspicuous exterior and think that you've seen a thousand shops like this before.But I promise you, you have never, ever, ever seen a shop like this.Let’s check it out.

Mike: As I've gotten older, in 2015, my best friend died nicest guy in the world, sweetheart who died of cancer And when I was leaving his funeral, I thought, you know, No one will remember me. I always say I can make everything.I'm proud. I can make anything. And that day, I decided to start making fun stuff in my shop. 

When I started, yeah, all I wanted to make was the forged days. That's why we opened and then it just kept growing and we grew to a point where I had room to make some of the art. And you seen in my shop, and I thought it was good for the shop. It's good for morale. You know, the guys can work on their car here.They can make whatever they want to make.

We've made our own fish tank. 

Brent: Wow.

Mike: So Mike bought the stingrays. And the Oscar's about almost ten years old.

Brent: Holy smokes.

Mike: So that was the first baby and these were the last ones here. And if you look, they're like they call them bat wings.And this turtle is my son's turtle.He's registered with papers from cities. He's endangered. It's a freshwater pig-nosed turtle, they call them. 

So one of the things I like doing is just putting artwork in the shop.I think it's creatively, it's good for everybody in the shop, too.

So we've made- that's all 50 states.

My dad was in the Army Air Force Second World War, so we right now we're in the middle of building a side of an airplane out there. I'll show you. And this is all 50 states.Kramer.

And this is a homage to the period I grew up in.

So welcome to my shop. Chemical machining.

So it's all time and speed that we make these.So you laminate it, you create your artwork, you add it through a car wash,get it out, strip the film off of it, what's left? And then we sharpen them.And we have three, so high-speed 40,000 rpm spindles.

More than half of the mail you get starts with my dies and I go in a grocery store and every aisle has got labels that I've made.I found out I was 7% Irish.I believe in Lucky Charms.

We sharpen our own tooling here. So we bought this at IMTS  a couple of years ago.

I believe in doing everything in-house.We treat in-house, we sharpen our tools. We'll end up doing 90% of our own, our own tooling in-house. Right now we do a lot of aluminum.So we were getting a price on, an enticing line.We'll do our own anodizing line. We're talking to the IEPA now. So these, like, if you were to go to a restaurant under the plates, there's a paper place mat. We make most of those for everybody in the country.If you buy an envelope that has seeds in it,you know this would be a seed envelope.

We hand sharpen everything in here.So my shop you're going to see from literally old, old school to the most modern machines made.So what we do, it's dark for a reason. That way,we can see the cutting edge on their hand sharpening that cutting edge tool. It'll cut when it's done, 2.5in of paper. And what we do is I have a blacksmith will bend a die, kind of carve it all by hand down to a cutting edge and then hand sharpen it. And I could machine it easily. I mean, I have enough machines, but a forge die is still the best die. Nice leather, brand new glove. Heavy. 

Everybody should have a Volkswagen. This will shoot a bowling ball. Four ounces, black powder.I calculated, should shoot at about 1280 feet.

This is April, We made her in April.That's me. She has a tattoo.

I collect anvils because I built my business over an anvil. That's an old granite anvil that was pulled out of Massachusetts.

This was a log that was in my yard. I carved that up.

That's Buzz, he’s my dragonfly. Mike wanted a dragonfly.That's a spider.That's where Mike and I work. Maybe turn the light off.

We have a full grinding room.So we'll talk over there.Where it’s not as loud.

But these  will end up being envelope guys. All your mail that comes in the mail. Your bills are number ten.So that's the most common one.

We just hired this fella, Ukrainian refugee. Super nice guy. Lost half his hand in a bomb.

Small grinders, large grinders.

We have three blacksmiths.One's on vacation right now. But what we'll do is we'll take a bar of steel.Someone will send us either a a drawing file, a PDF, whatever, or they'll ask us to design it.

I have a laser and what we'll do is we'll have the laser, we'll cut a ten, ten foot, and the blacksmiths will forge a bar of steel that's wedge shaped around that pattern.

I believe in anybody who wants to work. We'll teach him whatever we want, whatever they want to learn. So the fella I just showed you with, the hand. If he keeps moving up, I'll teach him anything he wants to learn in my company.We don't hold anybody down. 

Brent: How do you find people who know how to do this?

Mike: We train them straight. Train. 

I started as a die shop, but I love equipment. We have small saws, big saws.We fabricate here, somebody is building a fence.Stanley's building a motorcycle back there.We have surface grinding, Tig welding, MiG welding.

That was a 55.I had bought to restore, and it was just too much rust.So we cut it in half and put it on the wall. We do a lot of OD grinding, a lot of grinding.All our tolerances are 2/10. You know, if it's 3/10, it won't cut. It's that simple. I've worked since I was six. My dad was had problems because of the war. My mom had six kids. My mom worked hard. She put a lot of ethic in all of us. And, I worked. The first job I had was in a drug store, a liquor store and a gas station. So I have a drug store over there where I grew up was in Andersonville. I have a Sinclair gas station right now.

Yeah, I'm a marathon runner.So that's where marathon came from. So we do a lot of shelves. We do a lot of hard parts.Everything we have, we have good equipment and good guys.

So this is still under construction.That's my son's car.That's my truck. My guys get to bring their cars in here.We just welded up one of my employees cars and fix that. Another employee right now got in on an accident or something. So we're fixing his car like a live GTA garage.

That's my office back here..

Zora don't have who the Zeon, of course. And, corvettes z51, z06, ZR1, the Z stands for Zora. He was a chief engineer. He built this car, I'm all about the history of the 60s.

Brent: That's a pretty cool car.

Mike: Well yeah it's This is a car we're building right now.We'll come down on Sundays and work on the cars, but that's all new sheet metal. We rewired it, got an LS3 in it. This one we finished has an LZ, seven. And this, It's about 600 horsepower.If it's an A car, there's 3 or 4 of us here that know a lot about cars. And anything we can teach anybody here I think is good, whether it's a car mechanical, if it's mechanical, it's good.

So these are all knives that come for sharpening and you know, you can look, you know, like here's a good example.Our competition. They still machine old school slow RPMs. Everything we do is high speed machining.So look how smooth the bottom is.Yeah. It almost looks like it was turned or done on a sinker, but we did it with them milling machine faster than they did it with that. But that's the investment you make paying off. You know, I say all the time, if I get a customer to come here, chances are I'll get their work because of two things.They see the talent pool we have, the equipment I have. There's very few things we can't hit a home run on. 

And I see 2 or 3 types of shops out there right now. The dinosaur shop, I'm 65. I'll never retire. But a lot of guys I know that owned shops hit 55 and bought a Bentley and didn't put the money back, and which is cheating your employees and cheating on your family if they're there and I've done just the opposite. And my newest car is 50 years old, you know, another nice. But most of them weren't nice when I bought them. We made them that way. You know, these are blacksmithing gambles..

My grandpa was a blacksmith. The first bend the, blacksmith would make is to bend apart round. So depending on the size of the horse or the pony, you could have a pony funnel or a cone.Or if you had a Clydesdale,your first bend would be down around the middle of that cone.

One thing I'm really proud of is I try to be a one stop shop.I think if you're only a mill shop or only a turn shop or only a grind shop, chances are you have the technical ability to do all of it.It's just you didn't make that investment. And I've always bought big. You know, if you build it, they will come. That's been my philosophy all along.

So when we bought this building, I had no right buying a building this size. But I knew technically we were solid and people would find us.We don't advertise, we don't call people.It's been just pure luck or word of mouth.I don't want to say luck.

That was my dad. So they took this probably because it was the 25th mission.

They were supposed to go home, and probably the next day they got a bad letter saying or telegram saying no, you got to stick around for that was one of their planes. When it crashed, it caught fire.It's crazy. Right? 

Somebody sent me a picture of one someone made and said that you couldn't make that. Took a little bit. There’s 516 pieces of 316 stainless.

Brent: It’s a functional art museum in a way.

Mike: You know, this is where I think a lot of machine shops should be going, because it’s harder and harder to get young guys and the young guys only want to work, and I shouldn’t say that, because the Ukrainian fella is a good example of a guy that just wants better. But if you show them a path to make more, to do more, to learn more, most people will take that path. You know, and you can usually spot those people right away. 

Brent: So you must have had people who were interested in working here or that you wanted to bring on board and they just walk around and like you just said, all the creativity, all the projects that you work on.

Mike: Anybody wants to make anything, I’m all for it. You name it, we’ve made it. Mailboxes, lights, anything. 

Brent: You know, it sort of opens up your imagination. 

Mike: And it makes you want to learn more. You know, a lot of guys just come to work.I feel sorry to the guy that comes to work. And it's an an eight hour, you know. Oh, I got to go to work. I'd rather have a guy that's excited about coming here or knows that if he wants to work on something or make something.

I mean, we have the largest toolbox on the block, period.If you treat people like family and not just as an employee and show that you're investing in the company, but if they have some room to grow in the company, it's not hard to find people.

So you ever play darts? I'm a big dart player.

You know, we have high-speed machines, sinkers, wires, three, four, five axis. And in 2010,the house salesman had told me they were going to build a five axis, and I gave them a $5,000 deposit and said, I want one of the first ones. And they had one that came out in 2012.

We got one of the very first ones in the country, and I just saw it as a good investment. Again, you do anything you can to separate yourself from everybody else on the block. Yeah. And it worked. You know, five machine shops on this block. And I do work for all of them because they're all one-dimensional or two-dimensional. And if you can, the more you can do it, the more opportunities you have.

So in 2016 I went to IMTS and I've been going forever. I saw Matsuura with a palletizing machine. Jergens had their vises on it. They were building vises there at the machine shop.And I said, you know, handmade machine. That's a beautiful machine.I said, that's where I want to be.

So we bought we bought a 520 to start with five pallets, four pallets and one in. And we thought we would do production work. But it became such a great machine for having different work holding on each light without having to change prices all that time. You save hours every time you did that. So then we ended up buying another mam and then another mam, and I think we have 7 or 8 matures now.

We make everything now.I mean, when we when I bought the first ties, we did it for our dye shop. We would do rotary tooling and make whatever we needed for the dyes.And then as the shop got bigger, I just started buying equipment that we didn't need.I mean, the first high-speed mill we bought sat till we grew into it. You know, it's because I've always worked short-handed.We pay overtime, work short-handed, and buy equipment.

The best equipment I can buy anything. Grow into it. The first job I had for an outside customer, a friend of mine at a bearing company had a customer come in, need a bushing drilled, and he says, I'll take it over to Mike. He's a nice guy. He won't even charge you.And that led to a big company to another sister company, to somebody else who worked in a company who knew.

So it's a spiderweb.And, you know, I've always been proud that I didn't have a sign in the front of my building from my die site, because in my little world, people know me.The machine shop world is different. So what do you have to do to differentiate yourself from everybody else? Is be able to hit home runs. 

Yeah, I used to work for a company that had two bosses, and the one boss is what we do every morning.First thing we do is come in sit our drink down,and we walk around and say good morning to everybody, shake their hand.Everybody does that in the shop.When they leave, everybody says good night to everybody. And that's how the one owner was. And the other owner was technically, he could see around corners.He was a good guy. But one time we had just bought a new Mazak and the kid running it ran the RPMs up way too high, too big of a piece, took too much of a cut. Part came out of the machine, knocked the door off. Lucky it didn't kill him.Knocked him on top of the table behind him.The piece rolled over him over the door, hit the wall behind him.

This is a small shop.Everybody went running.The two owners, one owner said, do you want me to call you an ambulance? So let's get an ambulance.

The other owner walked over and picked up the door and wanted to see how bad it was.

And that day I decided which I wanted to be.We have three, two, three, four, five, ten axis lathes. Oh. It's beautiful. Lower turret, twin spindle.We started on the inner Rex.

Some parts easy, like the vacuum cylinders.Those were done on the inner of what you're in. Wow.

Brent: That's really nice.That's amazing. 

Mike: I mean, that's really, you know, buy technology if you buy technology you can't lose.

Brent: Wow, this building is way bigger than it looks like from the outside.

Mike: So we have these are horizontal Matsuuras, vertical Matsuuras. We have this is a 12 pallet horizontal. We have 15 pallets mam.

That's the airplane.I know they're they're the best machine. You know, Herman Lee's a good machine GROB.But when you look at a machine, it's got 15 pallets and that work envelope We make our own work holding here, so we make our own vises. Yeah, because, I mean, you start looking at a machine that's got 300 tool holders, you know, there goes a lot of money.

And then the cool off between everything,I don't know, 50, 60 vises. You know, 4 or 5 grand a vise. So we made all of our own.

Brent: How many employees?

Mike: You know, 50 to 60. Somewhere in there.So we have five axis. Haas.We have a bunch of three axis over there. Four axis are on the other side. This is a four axis. So we have smaller machines. Big machines.This was the first Haas pallet machine. I bought that at Am in 2022. 

Up here, we inventory a lot of parts. 

Brent: So I'm a musician. I've recorded lots of albums, and I recognize this. Oh, my goodness, what in the world? You guys have a full recording studio in here?

Mike: Yeah, that's pretty cool, isn't it? So my son-in-law knew a fella that rebuilds guitars. 

Brent: You know, I've played music since I was a kid. And so drumming is, is, you know, it's exercise, but it's also creative. Oh, this is amazing.

Mike: Nice. Goddammit. I wish I could play.That is amazing. 

Brent: What a place.It's different. 

Mike: Yeah, very, very different.

Brent: Hey everybody, Brant Donaldson with 91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ here. And if you just watched that video and you're thinking, boy, I'd like my shop to be featured in The View for my shop series, then just send us an email at shopvideo@MMSonline.com and tell us what sets your shop apart.