Generations of work with heavy metal

Ben McCullough likes heavy metal.

His grandfather likes heavy metal. So does his father. Uncles too.

You get the picture: It runs in the family.

So it makes sense when he opened his business last year it would be Livewire Fabrication, located off Flite Acres Road. Ben has a background in public art and still does smaller jobs, but the company’s main focus these days is building the infrastructure for houses.

Ben set up shop on the family’s rural property. He has a small cabin and some cows roaming around. There’s also a large barn to prep the metal. He still uses some of his grandfather’s tools.

He estimates he and his employees spend 70 percent of the time on the road building houses, and 30 percent of the time in Wimberley shaping the pieces. He has a crew of three employees — Chris Martinez, Trent Dorsey and Ben Paul — and employs six or seven subcontractors on each job.

Austin is his primary market, mostly working on high-end residences. But he also enjoys small, challenging jobs. “I’ll do anything for anyone around Wimberley,” says Ben. If you look at the Livewire portfolio on the company website you’ll see tables, benches, railings, and pieces of public art they have created.

Ben took a slightly different path of metal fabrication. He was born and raised in Houston. He got his bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Kansas City Art Institute, then was offered a full scholarship to the University of Delaware, where he earned his master’s degree.

Public art

There’s an abstract piece on display in front of his barn.

He started out making public art. “I lived in a contemporary art museum for awhile,” he recalls. “But I couldn’t make any money doing that.”

He produced public art for museums in Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Then he joined a company that built plants to manufacture cardboard. Obviously, a booming business.

A typical plant might take eight months to complete and, besides erecting the frame, he would put in steam lines, build specialized racks and storage, and come up with innovative solutions to the many problems that popped up. “That’s where I started saving the money to buy this,” he says while surveying the property.

He moved to Austin to settle down and starting working on, what he calls, “residential steel.” “Because that’s what the market is here.”

He found it a challenge. “There’s is a lot of problem solving getting the beams into places and making it (the metal) do things it doesn’t normally do,” he explains. “Putting I-beams in hard places is a lot of fun.”

Ben gets most of his steel from Mexico and Germany, but more and more it is coming from the U.S. The prices rise and fall daily, he notes. Some of his suppliers will only stick by their quoted prices for a day (it used to be 11 days).

Livewire does more than just build the platforms homes are built around. They can fashion most anything that’s made from metal.

On a recent day they were assembling large, triangular window frames headed for a high-end home in Austin. “People want those big windows where they can take in the beautiful views around here,” says Ben.

Stairs to lights

They do floating stairs, lighting fixtures and custom railings. People bring in challenging jobs. The crew is renovating a covered wagon that will be used in a fancy campground. And there’s a trailer in the yard that is waiting to be converted to a bicycle carrier.

Things are looking up these days. “It’s metalworkers working for metalworkers here,” says Ben. “It’s not some businessman always looking at the bottomline.

“Stuff around here has gotten to the point where the business part of things has calmed down and I have the perfect crew.”

There are no grand expansion plans “because we want to keep up the quality.”

Once the business is firmly established, Ben would like to use part of the profits to fund public art in the area and he’d also like to teach.

“I still consider myself an artist,” he says.

To see some of the projects the folks at Livewire have worked on, go to www.livewirefabrication.net. Contact them at 512-593-8842.