Good Influence: Wayward Machine Co.

Bobby and Kacy Middleton and the 18,000 lb Press Brake

Less than 3 years ago, Bobby and Kacy Middleton were living in a house in the suburbs with a yard the size of a football field.

Bobby had made a name for himself building vintage motorcycles under the name King Kustom. Over 15 years he’d won awards and been invited to build for the Born-Free vintage motorbike show for 3 years in a row. He had a social media presence and a following — kids who followed his work on instagram and aspired to make a living building award winning bikes.

But life in the suburbs left something wanting.  They didn’t particularly like yard work. “We were really bored,” Kacy says.

When their friend Daniel moved into a cool storefront on Morgan Street, they told him “If you see something else like this, let us know.”  A few days later, Daniel called to say that his landlord had bought the building on the corner of Morgan and 32nd Place. They drove in to see it that night. It was a shell of a building with cratered floors, a retail storefront and a garage large enough to build motorcycles.

Leaving a house they owned to rent an apartment, moving a whole shop of machine tools, seemed like a risk.  “We were asking ourselves ‘ Are we really going to do this?’”

Five weeks later the landlord had built out an entire apartment, the Middleton’s had rented their house, they shipped 10,000 pounds of machine tools to Bridgeport and opened the doors as Wayward Machine.

They’d brainstormed the name with friends.  They wanted something with attitude, and broader than motorcycles, something open to the possibilities of the space.  Maybe they’d open a lifestyle clothing store.

Meanwhile, Meg McMorrow, a good friend, had asked Bobby to build a couple restaurant light fixtures for Siren Betty, the design firm she was working at.  The fabrication jobs just snowballed from there.

Wayward Machine has spent the past 2 and a half years growing furiously by every measure - employees, shop space, tonnage of machines.  And not least in social footprint which has taken on dimension with a videographer on staff, and their street presence in a real neighborhood.  Every contact they refer to in the Chicago restaurant industry industry is also ‘a good friend,’ or ‘a great guy.’

“He’s figuring it out,” Kacy says of a good friend who runs a complementary business, like Wayward is doing.

Milling Machine - the Tool That Could Reproduce Itself

Wayward Machine opened with the tools Bobby used to build motorcycles: a lathe, a bandsaw, a welder and an antique Bridgeport mill (from Connecticut) that’s so versatile Bobby says it could reproduce itself.

They worked out of the garage at the back of their apartment.  As positions opened up, they drew on Bobby’s social media media followers - other bike builders who knew how to weld - or on neighbors, the barista at the coffee shop who knew auto CAD, the young woman who lived upstairs.

Then Meg, their friend at Siren Betty, took a job at Heisler, a restaurant development machine responsible for the Queen Mary Tavern, Estereo and Bad Hunter.  Heisler advertises its work on forward trending projects, a design aesthetic of “rawness of refinement,” and a desire to “mentor and champion the people they work with.”

In its first year of existence, Wayward Machine Co. was busy building furnishings for Bad Hunter for the better part of a year.  They built chairs in the hundreds, they built giant back bars, kitchen partitions, dropped ceilings from steel frames inset with wood, or with frosted glass to look like skylights.  They built a lot of steel and glass doors.

Steel and glass, for doors, windows and walls, has turned out to be a big moment in the interior decorating world.  Wayward builds them for a growing list of private residences too.

To keep pace, Wayward Machine has added staff; they moved the shop to 1100 West Cermak Road in Pilsen, a space large enough for work stations, fabrications tables and an office, and they’ve filled it with machine tools from old industry machine shops going out of business.

They’ve bought a punch press, benders to shape tubing, and an 18,000 pound brake press.  It puts down 100 tons of pressure to bend uniform angles into thick steel plate. They bought a sheer that slices 10 gauge plate like it’s cold wax with the push of a button.  Cutting it by hand would take someone 15-20 minutes with an abrasive grinder.  It would also be a screechingly loud, filthy job, and even without error or injury, the cut wouldn’t be clean.

"Like a giant mechanical paper cutter"

The tools themselves are all analogue technology from the 60s and 70s, “We can’t afford half million dollar machines,” Bobby says.  “We had to mess with them to make them work, because they’re old.” But they work well for the scale of Wayward’s jobs, and analogue has other advantages for a skilled mechanic.  “I never hooked up a press brake before, but I can make stuff work,” Bobby says,  “I’m not afraid to jump in there and figure it out.”

They still draw on some tried and true contacts in the suburbs - a certain chrome shop, and a certain powder coater. “His paint is perfect, no bullshit,” Bobby says.  “But we have to pack up the truck and send it to Addison.”

That’s one big advantage of their urban location.  Their steel supplier is just down the street.  Since founding Wayward there have been more connections close by, a 3-D printer, a foundry, a stamping company on the far south side.

Especially around the restaurant industry, they tend to describe their associates as people they’ve become close with, like the mill worker who makes wood tops for Wayward’s metal table bases. The electrician they use is doing all the hip restaurants. He doesn’t advertise, Bobby says. “Everybody just knows him.”  Wayward Machine built metal for his house; when Wayward moved the shop to a much larger space in Pilsen this Spring, he wired the new shop.

Their upholsterer, is a young businessman in West Town.  “He’s one of our best friends, we love him to death.” He’s upholstered every barstool Wayward Machine has built - over 300 of them so far. His father ran a cottage scale upholstery business, Aaron saw opportunity to grow.  Father and son still work together at the new business, Urban Craft Custom Upholstery.  Urban Craft is 7 years old, with 20 employees.

“We thought that was shocking,” Kasey recalls.  Now they’re half way there themselves.  They’ve got a project schedule 50 jobs long, they can point out 6 different jobs in progress from where we stand on the shop floor.

As the jobs multiply, the problem solving gets more complex.  There are endless calculations of dimensions, quantities and costs, of schedule and logistics, of keeping 5 or 6 jobs moving timely from one phase to the next. Not to mention the problems involved moving really big, cumbersome objects through space.

A Shop Full of Windows and Walls

Bobby points out a large steel structure that’s been built to fit an industrial size window for a loft conversion in Wicker Park.  “We could make this in 3 pieces,” Bobby says, “but we’d put it in and it wouldn’t look as good as it does now.

“So me being a psychopath, I say ‘Let’s make it one piece and we’ll just figure out how to get it there.’  So we’re going to figure out how to get it to Wicker Park.  We’ll put it on a trailer somehow, move it late at night.  We’ll figure it out.”

There will be more problem solving when they do.  The building is an old warehouse, so none of the floors are straight, none of the windows are square, it’s built of old brick that will start to come apart as they’re working it. It’s going to take a lot of patience to fit it in just right.

Bobby says problem solving is the part of the job he likes most.  He says Stephen Adzemovic excels in that area too, if you’re wondering what he’s up to since leaving Bridgeport Coffee.  They hired him because he could draw in autoCAD, but a lot of people can use software. “We work really well together,” Bobby says. “We bounce ideas off each other all day long.”

Kacy problem solves on the marketing side. “I make sure that we’re visible to the people that I know need us,” she says. “I can steer what our jobs are.  I know if we post a picture of a brass hood, and we post it in enough places or in the right way, tomorrow we’re going to get an e-mail from somebody who wants a brass hood.”

Last year, she started shooting video of the crew working on the shop and posting that on social media.  Now they have Nicolette Nunez, a full time videographer who follows them around with a video camera.  She found Wayward Machine on instagram, she’d offered to work for free. They said ‘Let’s try it for 2 weeks and see what happens.’  “She made herself invaluable,” Kacy says, “so we hired her full time.”

Street Presence

There’s something about the thought of a lot of people who may never have worked in a factory, who may never have reason to weld 2 pieces of steel together, wanting to watch video of other people doing it, that seems almost wholesome. 

We often use the word ‘lifestyle’ with a wink, to refer to appearances not connected to real substance.  But if we don’t resent being social creatures, we can’t reduce the way we watch each other, the various social cues we read, and send, as if they only work as status markers.

The Middletons have been communicating an attractive lifestyle since before they opened Wayward Machine.  King Kustom's social media accounts built on a shared an appreciation of a common object.  Wayward Machine’s communicate a style of life tied in to a style of work, one where something additional to cash is in circulation. It spills out from the social media accounts into their work networks, and from their house in Bridgeport, it spills out into the street.

The building on Morgan and 32nd Place had a sweeping mural across the street-side wall before they moved in.  Bobby and Kacy didn’t like all of it, so they engaged friends to repaint parts with motorcycles, wrenches.  They installed goose necked lighting so the sidewalk is bright at night.  They engaged Pat Finley, an elder sign painter, to paint the Wayward Machine Co. sign at the center of the wall. 

“He just paints, he doesn’t do any vinyl stickers,” Bobby says appreciatively. “He draws a big stencil on paper, uses a pounce pad that leaves an outline, just as a reference, then goes and paints on there.”

And they sit on the stoop with friends, and talk to anyone who pauses to chat as they walk by.  They’re out there a little less this year.  It’s been cold, they may be working all the time.  But that’s why they can tell you about a half dozen creative businesses going on behind curtains and storefronts on Morgan Street.  Appointment only vintage clothing shops - one for ladies a block or so north, and one for gentlemen just south, a print shop, urban gardening, documentary film.  Other folks who are figuring it out.

Since they moved the shop to Pilsen this spring, the house on Morgan Street is bigger than they strictly need to live in.  They use the storefront as an extra living room; they’ve installed kilns in the garage.  Kacy uses them to make art and household objects that look like geologic curiosities.  They run on the electrical that Wayward Machine used for welding.

“We definitely struggle with whether it makes sense to stay in the space financially, because it’s so large,” Kasey says.  “But we love it there.  As long as we can afford to pull it off I think we want to stay.”

Ever curious how it works around here? Full video link in bio! PS @team_ussa wears a beret......go check it out! #wamcoworkday video by the talented and uber creative @nicolettenunez.photo

A post shared by WAMCO | Bobby Middleton (@waywardmachineco) on Jun 27, 2018 at 4:09pm PDT

A Job at the Coffee Shop

You might not have known this when he was serving your breakfast order at Bridgeport Coffee, but Stephen Adzemovic has lived across the US and around the world, he’s lived longer in Chicago than he’s lived anywhere else in his life, and it might not be an exaggeration to say the coffee shop job helped keep him here.  “My life in Chicago is 90% Bridgeport,” he says.  And that is directly tied to connections he’s made at Bridgeport Coffee.

So when his other part time job told him they needed someone full time, Stephen wasn’t sure leaving the coffee shop was the right decision, even though the other job involves doing Computer Assisted Design work for Wayward Machine Co., a funky metal shop that builds custom furnishings for restaurants and other commercial interiors.  “My Dad is really glad I chose the metal shop,” he says. When he told his customers at Bridgeport Coffee he says they’d congratulate him like he was moving up in the world --“I was really surprised.”  His hesitation might make you think twice about what makes for meaningful work.

Stephen’s father was an immigrant who’d come to New York with his parents as a child, and who worked his way into a career in international banking.  Through a series of mergers and opportunities he’d moved his family all over the world, with especially long stints in the Middle East that started when Stephen was 12.

There were some things Stephen didn’t like about the Middle East.  He had that American itch to question received answers, which wasn’t common practice there.  “In some countries you’re legally not allowed to question; in others, people are allowed, but they don’t tend to do it.  Or they don’t talk about it, if they do.”

On the other hand he came to appreciate that people are people, wherever you go.  And more unusual, he came to appreciate the feeling of being out of his element.  “I liked that feeling of being outside,” he says. “Where I don’t fit in, and people don’t treat me like I fit in.”

That’s not a feeling most 12 year olds enjoy, and he admits he might not have enjoyed it right away.  But he came to appreciate the perspective, “even when it’s confusing and harsh, it’s also exciting.”  He says he expects to live internationally again, though he does wonder if it will be different, having come to appreciate the stimulations of parochial life. “It was new, I hadn’t experienced that before.”

Stephen moved to Chicago in 2011 to study architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and to Bridgeport in 2013, following an ad for an apartment on Craig’s List.  UIC has a great reputation as a theory school, and that’s what attracted him.  He wasn’t so interested in style or aesthetics, as in the power the architect has to make decisions, but decisions that were not arbitrary, decisions that are calculated to try formal ideas.

“Form follows function” is the classic theory of the old Chicago school, articulated first by architects whose designs were streamlined for modern office and manufacturing functions, without pretending to be from some earlier era.  They came to wear their steel frame structures as an aesthetic, without a lot of prettified details pasted on top.  Stephen says architects are pushing new limits with the terms “form” and “function” in the post digital era, but that’s not the problem that interests him personally.

“Initially it was a social thing,” he says of the kind of theory he wanted to pursue: the architect’s power to create space that affects people without them realizing, or paying attention.  He describes the feeling he got in an airport he visited recently – it was a vast space with a high ceiling, but the ceiling swooped up at the edges, so it was concave, it felt like it was bearing down on you, making you small.  People tend to feel small in cathedrals too, but cathedrals soar upward toward the center, drawing your eye into the vastness.  “It’s not about you and how small you are,” Stephen says.

Stephen’s not sure he’s interested in building a lot of large structures, right now he’s more interested in smaller spaces, where he can design an environment, especially since that’s the scale that’s accessible to him now.

He recently joined up with friend David Ramis to build an experimental project at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the gallery just down the street from the coffee shop, where they’d helped reorganize the basement in return for use of some of the space.

They built two walls, joined at a 5 degree rotation.  The walls were built out of regular sheetrock and studs, but it didn’t quite reach the ceiling, the 2 walls met at that odd little angle, the sheetrock was cut and distressed up top to make a pattern in relief.  “It’s made of all the things a wall is made of, but it’s to make fun of walls, it’s about finding ways to re-imagine something we take for granted.  It forces you to pay attention.”

Stephen was very happy with the results, they invited friends and local artists to see it, and some of Stephen’s architecture professors came to see it too.

After school, Stephen considered the kinds of things most people do just after architecture school.  They go straight to graduate school, or they get a low level job at an architecture firm.  Neither of those options seemed all that compelling.  He took the job at the coffee shop while he was considering his options. “If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you I’d be there for 6 months.” He ended up working there for 2 and ½ years.

“It’s more about the people than my passion for beans.  I really don’t care about coffee beans.” The coffee shop is where he came to appreciate life in a small neighborhood.  “I’m not anonymous,” he says. “I know people here, and I’m known.

“I don’t think it would be the same if I worked at a coffee shop in a different part of the city.”  Sure he would have had regulars, sure he would have made friends, but the people would probably be more transient. “Neighborhood, community, those are real things in Bridgeport.”

He lived on Lloyd Street for awhile, where all his neighbors had been born there, not just in Bridgeport but on that street.  “The neighbor next door had been there for 80 years.”

Meanwhile he was interacting with a constant stream of people at the coffee shop.  He couldn’t choose who came through, though he had some control over how much he engaged with people, which he sometimes exerted in a playful way.

“There was one guy who took years to warm up to me,” he recalls.  “He’s one of the grumpier people, a gentleman who always came in and got the same order.”  Stephen made a point of being extra friendly “partly as a way to take some power back.” Eventually the friendliness took, especially after they ran into each other outside the coffee shop.  Now Stephen will show him projects he’s working on to hear what he thinks – he trusts his opinion. “We’re interested in engaging in the same conversation.”

He’s made scores of other friends and acquaintances that way, a professor at the School of the Art Institute, staff from the restaurants and bars nearby, transplants and people who’ve lived or worked in Bridgeport all their lives.

Sometimes someone would make a comment or a joke he thought was “on the less cool side of the line.” Not necessarily about race, it might be homophobic. “Something that I don’t want to smile at,” as Stephen puts it “but not so serious that I’m going to take myself out of the role of smiling server to say ‘Hey, don’t say that.’”

He says he’d smile, and disagree.  “I’d say ‘I don’t think that way.’”

Which, if you think about it, might have more influence than an actual argument. Especially now, when social divides seem so wide that even people of good will talk right past each other, that kind of soft exposure might be exactly what we all need to make incremental shifts in our point of view – like the kind Stephen might exert on a patron, or the kind the neighborhood has exerted on him.

Soft influence is possible here, in an old neighborhood with new people moving in, and the coffee shop is one of the places, like a tidal pool, that we swirl through and brush shoulders for awhile.  But that mix is fragile too.

Stephen says he’s never had trouble with the young gang bangers or drug dealers or occasional shootings that also happen around Morgan Street, because the people engaged in that understand he’s “not part of the mix.”

Where he has felt tension, it’s been from people who see that cluster of businesses on 31^st and Morgan as an engine of gentrification that will force their families out.  And they might be right.

Stephen points out that lots of patrons come from outside the neighborhood to Kimski’s to see what Korean-Polish fusion is, or to meet friends at Bridgeport Coffee, and they see that it’s friendly, they know that the rents are cheap, and they find the neighborhood seems pretty safe. 

“I’m probably helping gentrify the neighborhood,” Stephen says “but I’m gentrifying myself.”

That’s the great neo-bohemian dilemma: the service jobs of the people who staff the establishments that make neighborhood life dynamic don’t pay well, leaving them among the most vulnerable to being priced out.

That might be more an accident of labor history than natural law.  There’s no inherent reason service jobs couldn’t be organized and well compensated.  The services might cost more.  In the meantime, patrons can contribute directly to the stability of their servers at the coffee shop, or the bike shop, or the take-out counter at Johnny O’s by making good use of the tip jar.

And there’s another factor at play.  Small landlords who live on their properties are a diminishing breed across the city, even in Bridgeport where the owner occupied 3 flat has been well represented.  But they still persist here more than elsewhere.

Stephen has lived in 3 apartments in Bridgeport, each one of them owned by landlords who had a family member in the building, or they lived there themselves, or, at his current place, the owner lives next door. The fact that none of his apartments were owned by investment groups or distant landlords in the suburbs may be a factor in the cheap rents that drew him here.  It might also help keep some rents stable in the longer term.

At one of his apartments, the rent was so cheap, Stephen wasn’t sure he shouldn’t tell the owner she could be charging more.  But she lived in the building, she wanted good tenants who didn’t demand a lot but might stay awhile.  He was pretty sure she was charging one of his immigrant neighbors something like small change to live there, because she’d once been an immigrant too.

When the guys from Wayward Machine Co. first started coming to the coffee shop, Stephen recalls with some amusement that he thought there was some weird power dynamic going on, because the boss always ordered first.  At one point, he made a joke about it, and they all thought it was pretty funny.  “Now, knowing them better, it wasn’t what I thought.”

One day, they were all standing around outside the coffee shop, talking about a big project they had coming down the pike that they knew they would need a lot of drawings for, and they asked “Do you know anyone who knows CAD?” Stephen knew CAD. “A few hours later, I was working there.”

“They care about the neighborhood.  They’ve done a lot of projects here,” Stephen says.  They also seem to be thriving.  They opened the shop in a large garage space at 32^nd Place & Morgan in 2016. They’ve just moved to Cermak and May Street because they needed more space.  Stephen started full time when the new shop was ready.

He won’t be doing metal fabrication himself, though having a better understanding of how fabrication is done is definitely one of the perks of the job.  And the scale of their projects is a lot like the kind of design he wants to do: building restaurant and other commercial environments.

“Working there is really cool,” Stephen enthuses.  “But I don’t know if it’s the last time I’ll work in the service industry.”

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