From Hairdressing To Icebergs At McNamara Fabricating

Commuters and others who travel Interstate 290 through Worcester’s south end may have noticed that Polar Beverages’ giant polar bear went missing recently.

When it returned, it was atop a huge, shiny “iceberg.” Now, it turns out that the iceberg was made locally by McNamara Fabricating on Southbridge Street in Worcester. I recently paid McNamara a visit and found that the small shop will fabricate almost anything for anyone, and the iceberg is just the latest in a long line of projects the company has done for Polar.

In fact, in the early days, back in the late 1980s, when Jim McNamara started the business, Polar was his primary customer. McNamara worked on bottling lines, filling heads and conveyors. When Polar called on McNamara to make a stand for what was supposed to be a white plastic iceberg, the folks at Polar decided the plastic looked too much like snow and asked McNamara to make a metal one that would glisten like ice.

Heavy Metal

But don’t think that the iceberg is just a one-off for McNamara. In fact, it’s not the only thing the company has made that could be considered an art installation. According to Jim McNamara, the company at one time even made a musical instrument for a church out in Sudbury.

“We do not have a product. Nothing we make is our own product,” McNamara explained. “We work with machine builders and OEMs and we’ll make anything from metal-detecting equipment to braiding for a good variety of industries.”

The main industry McNamara works with is the food manufacturing, and a lot of it is local, for companies like Polar and Table Talk Pies. The industry took up the slack after the auto industry all but vacated Central Massachusetts.

Tim Walsh, McNamara’s operations manager, said the shop also does a large amount of repair work and trouble shooting for customers.

“I love it when people come to us with issues,” he said.

One project the shop is working on currently is for a hairdresser who with McNamara’s help has designed a piece of equipment that dispenses the aluminum foil used in the hair coloring process in salons.

That item has been through a couple of iterations and Walsh talked about it with enthusiasm equal to that he expressed about a large, complex piece of equipment that a biotechnology company had made at McNamara.

That project included a piece of equipment that could remove plants being used in vaccine research from the vessels they’re grown in.

The fact that Central Massachusetts has that kind of variety of potential clients is very good for the 10-employee McNamara, which keeps its focus very local.

“We stay local because many of the parts we make are too heavy to carry across the country,” McNamara said.

Plus, it keeps the company accessible to the customers that seek out repairs there.

“National Grid will show up at 3 o’clock with a problem and say, ‘I need one of these,’ and we’ll help them out quite a bit,” Walsh said.

Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.