New Building’s Construction Signals Techmetals’ Growth

Within three minutes on a recent weekday afternoon, three men walked into the lobby of metals finisher Techmetals Inc. to ask for job applications.

The word on the street is Techmetals is growing. One big clue is the construction of a 67-foot-tall, 12,000-square-foot building off Springfield Street.

The new building — one of eight the company has near Springfield and North Findlay streets — will house new metals coating processes the company is commercializing. Customers as diverse as the U.S. Mint, the military, Toyota and Boeing have turned to the company for coatings and finishes.

“We just come up with ways to make metal parts better,” said Dan Brockman, Techmetals’ chief executive.

The new building will be home to a 20-ton lifting bay with floor-to-hook heights of 55 feet. Brockman and his son, Phillip, the firm’s director of business development, are determined to see it finished by Dec. 31. The building and tooling inside will be worth an estimated $3 million.

The company specializes in coatings that provide desired properties — from finishing a food processing part with a 40 percent diamond coating to protect it from seeds and acids, to “metallizing” a product in a way that either shields it from or makes it conduct electricity.

The firm also commercializes technologies. Phillip Brockman said Dow Chemical Co. recently bought a technology, but he declined to describe it.

The company’s coatings have resisted efforts for decades to figure out how they are made, the Brockmans said. The idea is to make the company indispensable to its customers.