Merker, 49, says business doesn’t slow down no matter what tricks the economy is up to. Gates, fences and railings - and their upkeep - don’t go out of style. Work is steady through boom and bust, even in a grueling, slow recovery.
Dozens of driveway gates a year, hundreds of small jobs from Kentucky to Springfield, from Charleston, West Virginia, to Kokomo, Indiana, flow through his shop.
Think up what you want, Merker builds it with his crew of a half-dozen workers. He’s custom made a sun visor mount for a vintage car, bar stools, and furniture. The family has a little history here. While Merker Ornamental Iron began with Bill’s grandfather Fred in 1947, great-grandfather Adam was manufacturing furniture in Dayton a couple decades earlier.
Merker’s shop in East Dayton is packed with tools and equipment from another era. Poke around and you’ll find his grandfather’s unused coal forge, now replaced with a less smoky propane model, and a big Hossfeld bender used to bend steel. Twenty-foot steel bars stack up on wall racks, a white-hot arc weld seals a joint, and half a steel gate hangs in the paint room for finishing.
Ohio’s restaurant and bar smoking ban meant more outdoor patios - Merker makes the railings. Think Milano’s and the new Jimmie’s Ladder 11 tavern on Brown Street. Metal thieves went on a tear in Dayton’s St. Anne’s Hill and Oregon historic district neighborhoods and swiped very old steel gates. Merker replaced them with steel welded in place. The next thief will need a blow torch and a lot more time.
A job - say an elaborate length of stairway railing for an estate - can take up to 11 months. “American buys too much junk,” says Merker. “If you want it done right, I’m your guy. If you want it to last.”
Custom home builder Steve Rhoads of R.A. Rhoads Inc. has worked with Merker for 25 years. “He just does it all,” Rhoads said. “He delivers superior product.”
It’s skilled work, and workers have to find their talent. Knowing how to weld isn’t enough. You have to learn to fabricate. For all the employees who have trained there, Merker is supervisor, instructor, and coach. He’s all over the place, always in motion, eyeing a weld here, checking a gate layout there, offering suggestions on measurement. It’s his way or the highway, and precision is everything. The mechanics of custom steel-shaping haven’t changed a lot over the years.
“Technology is great, but some things need to be done by hand,” Merker said.
There are no CNC machines or computers anywhere to be found in this shop. No two jobs are alike, and railing curves must meet real-world layouts. They’re never according to some book. A hard tug, a gentler pull, a little hammer action for the steel and it’s bent to fit.
Dereck Brown, 24, is shop foreman. An artist in steel sculpture and Stivers High School graduate, he began at Merker at age 19.
“It’s way fast-paced, and there is always something to do,” he said. “It’s hard work, and that’s what I like. I like driving past my work and saying, ‘I built that.’”
Last week found his crew at a Washington Twp., mini-mansion, installing railings at an unfinished home picked up at deep discount by an investor hoping to resell it.
From that job, there’s one restoring 100-year-old gates in West Milton. Merker has put 150,000 miles on his truck in two years.
“My wife says I even sleep fast,” Merker said before climbing into his truck and heading north.
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