In Ryan Gagnon’s world, welding and metal fabrication give ideas solid form and an industrial edginess.
From gates, stairways and railings, to bar stools, beer towers and stainless-steel countertops, to reclaimed-wood tables and wine-bottle holders — the list goes on and on — Gagnon Welding 42 Inc. has been pulling objects from the ether for 15 years from its base in Snohomish.
“If you can dream it, we can make it happen,” Gagnon said.
Starting out in late 2000 with a single truck and a trailer, Gagnon, now 43, first worked by himself as a mobile welding and metal-fabricator company. He found plenty of business.
“It’s amazing how, if you just show up on time and you return phone calls, people will use you,” he said.
Within a couple of years, he’d moved to a shop location, started hiring employees, sold his truck-and-trailer combination and bought a bigger truck.
Today he has four “rigs,” nine employees — eight in the shop and one in the office — and is buying the building that houses his shop at 1208 10th St. in Snohomish.
He also recently opened 42 Metal Design a few blocks away, at 905 First St., to display some of the furniture and other creations that come out of his shop.
Store hours are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; hours will increase as the business grows, Gagnon said.
And grow it surely will, as more people discover what Gagnon Welding 42 Inc. can do. Just ask Mike Lavallee, artist and owner of Killer Paint airbrush studio next door.
“He looks at projects from a different angle,” Lavallee said of Gagnon. “He’s not your ordinary welder.”
He figures it’s Gagnon’s artistic bent that makes them connect so well.
And they trade their talents; Lavallee painted the distinctive flame designs on Gagnon’s work trucks and Gagnon has done projects for Lavallee that include building showcases, security bars, a business sign and the gate in front of his garage.
“If I want anything done, from ordinary welding up to specialty welding, there’s no one else I’d consider,” Lavallee said. “And it’s not just because we’re friends.”
Gagnon learned his trade in a welding course he enrolled in after high school at Lake Washington Technical College in Kirkland, now called the Lake Washington Institute of Technology.
From there, he worked for eight years at Kenworth Truck Company in Renton, welding truck axles and mostly doing the same thing day in and day out.
It was years later that he realized his artistic side, after he’d opened his shop. He’d been doing “a lot of gates and railings,” he said, when he met Don Bellis, president and co-owner The Rock Wood Fire Pizza in Washington, where the franchise began. Bellis had been picking up a truck from Lavallee’s Killer Paint airbrush studio.
“He popped next door and said, ‘Hey, are you interested in welding stuff for our restaurant?’” Gagnon said.
That was at about number three for the restaurant chain, which started in Auburn and now has some 20 restaurants ranging throughout the Pacific Northwest — including in Lynnwood and Mill Creek — and as far north as Alaska and south in Texas.
“It went from building little stuff to helping create everything from tables to beer towers to a crane falling out of the wall,” Gagnon said.
Gagnon Welding 42 Inc. “played a major role in the construction of all metal elements in our restaurants,” wrote Bellis, in a testimonial on the welding company’s website, going on to say that not only is the company skilled in welding and metal fabrication, it is also artistic.
“We can simply give Ryan a rough sketch, or idea,” Bellis wrote, “and he transforms that into something cool.”
Gagnon said, “It’s not all me; I also have good employees that help create a vision with me.”
Another plus is that his company sees a project through, from start to finish.
“We’ll come to your house,” he said, “measure it, go over designs, design something, and then we go back to your house and install it.”
For long-distance projects, such as those for The Rock Wood Fire Kitchen in different states, Gagnon said he usually ships his shop’s creations, then he and employees travel to the site “in a pack of four” and install them.
Not so long ago, they traveled to the Boston area, where Bellis — who’d moved back after several years in Washington — bought a house just a few doors down from New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. As a rib to the football rivalry with New England, Gagnon fastened a Seahawks plaque to the inside back of the shipping crate; displaying a photo on his phone, he laughed about the reception that must have gotten, though he said Bellis took it like a good sport.
These days his company’s work is apparent in the industrial metalwork at a variety of restaurants, including the Trails End Taphouse and Restaurant, and The Black Duck Cask and Bottle in Issaquah.
“We’re very fortunate that we got in with different restaurants,” he said, “where people let us design and help create.”
As for the 42 in his company’s name? That’s a creation of a different sort, arising from a rowdy night with a snowboarding friend many years ago, Gagnon said. The two were idly wondering how far it was to Mount Baker, where they planned to snowboard the next day, and decided to make a bet. Whoever guessed closest won and the other guy had to buy lift tickets.
“We said, on the count of three say your number,” Gagnon explained. “And we both said 42.”
It’s been a family number ever since, so much so that his 16-year-old son, Riley, even claimed it for his football jersey. Gagnon also has two daughters: Rainey, 14, and Ria, 11. His wife, Rebekah, works in the shop office.
Employees have come and gone over the years as they’ve moved on to different jobs or locales, but Gagnon said he can think of only one who parted on not-so-good terms. Some have a lot to learn, but he’s willing to teach them, he said, as long as they show up on time every day and are willing to work hard. Sometimes he’ll lend a truck to help them move or give them an extra day off.
“Do I have benefit packages like Boeing or Kenworth?” he said. “No. But I have a family atmosphere here.”
Sometimes he needs advice himself on how to do something, such as welding bronze, which is when he calls on mentors like Chris Gallagher, an owner of Metalistics Inc. in Everett, which rolls the metal many fabricators use in their projects.
Gallagher said he is always happy to “pass along our vast, limited knowledge” to other metal fabricators.
“It’s kind of a network of fabricators,” he said, “and we all know each other.”
Gagnon “has a lot of creativity” and is very involved in his community, Gallagher said.
“You can’t go anywhere in Snohomish without running into someone who knows him,” Gallagher said.
Residents of Snohomish are very supportive of each other, Gagnon said, and 99 percent of his business comes from word-of-mouth.
“The nice thing about the community is, a lot of us, we all use each other,” he said.
Everything he does now is custom-made, but in the future, Gagnon said he’d like to move away from that a bit and sell more out of his 42 Metal Design store.
“I’d love to whip out that fish tank five times,” he said. “I’d love to make a table five times.”
Still, nothing beats the one-on-one with his clients.
“My favorite part of my job is seeing the customer’s face, seeing the customer happy,” he said. “It’s really cool.”
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