Alaska Sheet Metal celebrates 20 years: this employee-owned company employs 43 and has revenues of up to $9 million annually.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: BUILDING ALASKA

Alaska Sheet Metal first started rolling and cutting its ductwork and fabricated metal pieces when an unemployed sheet metal worker and a mechanical engineer opened a shop together on B Street in Anchorage back in 1988.

Twenty years later, the company brings in revenue of $7 million to $9 million annually, operates out of larger headquarters on Whitney Road, employs 43 people and is beginning to explore other frontiers of sheet metal fabrication.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Alaska Sheet Metal is a component of The Superior Group Inc., formerly known as Superior Plumbing & Heating Inc., which purchased the company in April 1994. Alaska Sheet Metal is a union contractor signatory to Local 23 Sheet Metal Workers International Association.

Among Alaska Sheet Metal's projects are the new construction at Dimond High School, Eagle River High School, Arctic Slope Regional Corp.'s 10-story building, JL Towers, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and the Atwood parking garage.

ASM also has completed projects for the Alaska Heart Institute at Providence Alaska Medical Center, Barrow Global Research Facility, Centerpoint Financial and on the North Slope.

The bulk of Alaska Sheet Metal's work is commercial, involving heating, ventilation and air conditioning, but the company branches out into custom fabrication of such things as stainless-steel kitchen countertops, snow-machine brackets and metal artwork.

Darrell Koontz, the company's general manager, says Alaska Sheet Metal's shop employees fabricate ducts and fittings that the field foreman details for them.

THE RIGHT CUT

"We have a guy who sits at the computer and sends that information to a cutting table out on the floor," Koontz explained. "They will cut all the different shapes that make up the fitting, put a little sticker on it, put it on the table. The shop guys will pick it up and form that flat metal into whatever fitting is needed."

Alaska Sheet Metal workers can cut metal pieces with the company's 5-foot by 10-foot plasma table, form numerous sizes of spiral pipe with its spiral and oval machines and bend stainless steel, copper, aluminum and "mild" steel into a variety of possible configurations with its computerized 135-ton press brake.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Don Costley, Larry Kampen and a silent investor founded Alaska Sheet Metal on Jan. 21, 1988, not long after the company Costley and Kampen had been working for, Skoglund & Co., went out of business.

Kampen, a mechanical engineer...