WARROAD, Minn. — They call it Hockeytown, USA, although Detroit and a few other cities across the country stake that claim too.
A walleye sandwich was a favorite lunch order.
But here in Warroad, six miles from the Canadian border, hockey and ice skating rule (along with walleye pulled from Lake of the Woods). There’s no movie theater or bowling alley. The nearest Starbucks is 138 miles away, and if you need something from Walmart, well, that’s an 80-mile run.
There is one commercial engine in this town of 1,782 people: the family-owned Marvin Windows and Doors Co. It operates within 2.2 million square feet of work space on 45 acres, employing about 2,000 people here (including one person whose full-time job is to replace light bulbs throughout the sprawling campus.)
In late October, eight men from across Middle Georgia got a chance to tour the plant and get a closer look at how Marvin’s products are made. Frank Ferrer, who runs Architectural Visions Inc. in Macon, led the crew, which included Ethiel Garlington, Historic Macon’s executive director, and five contractors. (AVI is a Historic Macon Preservation Partner.)
Frank Ferrer, far left, led the crew that toured the Marvin Windows and Doors factory late last month.
From the wood processing area to the 3-D printing room, the operation is a synthesis of cutting edge technology and old-school craftsmanship.
When we walked into wood processing on the first day, we were dwarfed by huge stacks of lumber that seemed to go on forever (It called to mind the closing scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when a worker wheels a crated-up ark of the covenant to oblivion alongside hundreds of other boxes.)
But there are no voids here. About 8 million board feet at a time are rolling through the plant. Long gone are the days of chop saws and hand routing. Technology reduces errors and maximizes yields.
Stacks of wood pour in, and they’re sorted by hand. Machines measure moisture content and “read” all four sides at one time. One machine uses a software program to tell another one where to make cuts (or, down the line, where router tips should make particular grooves.)
There are automated screw guns and even “vibrating bowls” that shoot screws to the guns in the right direction. Another machine applies a thin layer of silicone to the inside of a frame — and even wipes itself off afterward.
What if a board is too short or has a flaw or defect?
April Richter, our tour instructor.
“A hundred percent of the lumber we get in, we use,” said April Richter, our tour instructor. If a board cut is more than 1/64th of an inch off, it meets another fate, which may include the mulch pile. (Sure enough, we looked out a window a few minutes later to see a mountain of sawdust bound for the boiler system to generate heat.)
They even have a “tear-down lab” where a blind order that someone in the Marvin corporate offices submitted is dismantled piece by piece — up to 200 of them — to check for quality.
Did we mention that Warroad is isolated? That means Mavin folks have to take care of themselves.
“Everything is handled in-house,” Richter said. “We have to be self-sufficient.” There’s even a separate shop just to keep the knives on machine heads razor sharp.
That precision is crucial.
“If we don’t machine it properly, it’s not going to fit together over in production,” Richter reminded us.
Sometimes the Marvin folks get special requests to replicate an old feature on a home or building that’s long past its prime. Their 3-D printer can do that once they get a 3-D scan.
“We can duplicate what was originally there,” Richter said.
While we were there, an employee named Chris showed us a refashioned corbel from the printer made of solid aluminum that had been milled away to get the desired shape. (A corbel is a piece of stone, wood or metal, often in the form of a bracket, that projects from the side of a wall.) It took about 27 hours to mill one particular piece.
In some cases, Marvin workers make full-size mock-ups of projects to make sure they’ll get it right.
And some of those replicas are massive.
Greg Muirhead, with the company’s architectural department, described one window project for a school that was 80 feet by nearly 190 feet. (For each college that they work on, the Marvin folks hang a school banner. Right now, there are more than 120 of them, including one from Mercer University.)
For the Sir James Whitney School for the Deaf in Ontario, the company generated a handful of mock-ups. It took a month to develop the massive prototype, which weighed 43 tons in all when a truck pulled out for the 500-mile trip to the school. (The weight limit to cross into Canada was 40 tons, though, so the company had to send another truck to help.)
A year of research and consulting preceded construction on a 15-by-23-foot rose window (and front-entrance centerpiece) for St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Potsdam, N.Y. That preservation work also involved joining together 816 pieces of stained glass. (Get a closer look at the work here.
The trip was a real eye-opener.
“We were fascinated with the broad range of production and fabrication equipment used in the factory,” said Christopher Haun of Haun Design Build. He and his brother, Brandon, were among those who made the trip.
“We respected the extent of hands-on production work still being performed, the quality control over their high-end (Signature) line, and their ability to consult with general contractors and architects on custom order products for historic restorations.”
He added, “We were impressed with the Warroad community as a whole and especially the hospitality of the Marvin employees.”
And Marvin preservation work finds its way back to Macon too.
Hardman Hall, a former Carnegie Library, was a second remodeling project on the Mercer University campus. (A $20,000 Carnegie grant was seed money for the building in 1906.)
“We knew we had a reputation to uphold, and Mercer University sought to maintain the historical look of the building with modern, energy-efficient windows that would last as long or longer than the original windows,” Ferrer said. “We worked with Historic Macon Foundation and BTBB Architects to achieve the look.
“Historic Macon Foundation was a crucial component in receiving state and federal approvals,” he added. “Their guidance was indispensable.”
Taking the trip were, L-R, Clint Brimmer, Christian Yun, Oby Brown, Brandon Haun, Ethiel Garlington, Christopher Haun, Tom Yun and Frank Ferrer.