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By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter 

Specialty Machining lives up to its name

Second generation machine shop in business to be problem solver

 

Last updated 10/29/2015 at 2:42pm

Paul Delaney

Rod Hagel is the second generation of his family to make miracles happen out of chunks of metal.

It's not called Specialty Machining just because that was the first name that came to the mind of company founder Wayne Hagel.

The business located on Geiger Boulevard along Interstate 90 near Spokane International Airport has been taking on the challenges others might not want to - or hadn'r even thought of - for nearly a half century.

"Dad kind of started the business on the back of self-cleaning plywood lathe chucks," owner Rod Hagel said. A lathe chuck goes on each end of an 8-foot section of a log when it is turned into thin sheets of wood that are laminated to make plywood.

But in the 1960s those trees that were full of pitch would scatter wood ships during the peeling process. The two elements combined and made a mess that was next to impossible to clean. The lathe had to be stopped every few hours and workers used hammers, screwdrivers and chisels to clean them.

"Dad came up with these and he sold them for 40 years," Hagel said. The last pair came out of the shop in 1999.

With the help of the device, the lathes averaged a log in and a log out every five seconds. When Hagel recently visited the last customer, the Boise Cascade mill in Kettle Falls, Wash., he wondered how things were going. He saw the lathe manufacturers had finally employed similar technology.

"It took the plywood lathe manufacturers about 40 years to catch up," Hagel said.

Specialty Machining was founded in 1972 by Wayne Hagel. He had learned his trade working years for Washington Machinery in Spokane. WayneHagel initially worked out of the garage of his home, just west of the present shop and the place Hagel and family still live. Wayne Hagel passed away in 2009.

A trip to Specialty Machining is a crash course in all things threads and gears where one learns the difference between it all.

Hagel, 54, learned the business, he said, "From Dad and the Lord, working in here part time in junior high, high school and college. He attended and graduated from Cheney schools in 1979 and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Washington State University in 1984.

"I went to work for BP (British Petroleum) in Alaska, the job of a lifetime," Hagel said. "About six years later dad's partner was going to retire and he wanted me to work with him." Hagel joined his father in the business in 1990.

Hagel said he loved working with his dad. "For me it was the experience of a lifetime and I wouldn't trade it for anything."

"When I came to work here in '90 it was twice as much fun as the best engineering job in the world I could imagine for myself," Hagel said. "I'm engineering and I'm working with my dad."

Hagel, who has five grown children, knows the business will not likely be transferred to a third generation. His oldest, 28, worked in the shop 10 years ago but has not been back. Another dabbled in it from time to time but determined it was not for him.

The projects scattered about the shop range from building replacement gears for an Edwall-area farmer's tractor to parts for hardware supplier Jensen-Byrd.

And all of them are turned out with vintage machining equipment, some of which dates back to the 1920s.

Besides the plywood chucks, Specialty has found various additional niches through the years, all of it very specialized and custom in nature.

Hagel worked for the city of Medical Lake to build parts for their wastewater treatment plant's lagoon mixer. A mine in the Silver Valley approached Hagel for a fix on an exclusive piece of machinery. A retrofit suggested by another company just was not going to work.

Ironically, the lone piece of computer-aided equipment, a computerized numerically controlled, or CNC, sits idle and is a catch-all for this and that.

It ran for about 10 years but the 1990-model sits silent in a corner. "I've had electronic problems with it." Hagel can no longer find circuit boards, or even the parts for the boards, he said incredulously.

"This has been a great toy but it hasn't made me hardly any money, if at all," Hagel said.

Speciality Machinery is located at 8012 W. Geiger Blvd. in Spokane. Business hours are Monday– Thursday, 7 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. To contact Speciality, call (509) 747-1481, email denali.alyeska@gmail.com or visit specialtymachiningco.com.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.

 

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