Building architectural metalwork, restored automobiles, and the rare in-between. Aerospace-trained. Desert-tempered. Mike's work reflects a deep appreciation for Bauhaus principles, where every line serves a purpose and beauty emerges from function.
FIG. 01
Form matters, but function comes first. Clean lines, durable materials, and construction that respects both the user and the person who may one day have to service it.
FIG. 02
FIG. 03
From the railing the homeowner runs their hand along every day to the trellis the architect drew with you on a napkin. Everything is fabricated, finished and installed by Chubby Spider.
FIG. 04
FIG. 05
For owners who can name the casting marks. Sheet-metal panel work, chassis correction, fiberglass repair, and the patient detective work of putting a car back the way it left the factory.
Owner, fabricator, draftsman · B.S. Aerospace Engineering
Mike trained as an aerospace engineer and never left the shop floor. Twenty-five years in, the calculations sit comfortably alongside the chalk-line and the TIG welder. The same discipline that gets a wing to fly straight gets a forty-foot trellis to read as a single drawn line.
He keeps an encyclopedic library of automotive marques and an equally serious one of mid-century architects. Conversations with him drift, without warning, from the geometry of an Eames lounge to the design decisions that made the original Ford Bronco an enduring icon. Both are honest forms, and the work that comes out of the shop reads that way.
The business answers to Chubby Spider. The practice answers to him.
FIG. 06
Five stages, one set of hands. The architect, the client and the installer are the same person. The field decisions never get translated through a third party.
Walk the site with the architect, the homeowner, or both. Measure twice. Sketch in front of you. Photograph everything.
Week 1CAD drawings, dimensioned and finish-specified. Fixed-price quote with materials, finishes, and an honest schedule.
Week 1–2Cut, welded, ground and finished in the Phoenix shop. Mid-build review photos sent to the client. Nothing leaves until it's right.
Week 2–6Powder, paint, patina or raw. Coordinated with the project's other trades so colors and metals read as a family on the wall.
Week 5–7Fully equipped to install on-site across the Southwest. The fabricator and the installer are the same person. Resulting in fewer surprises in the field.
Day-ofInfluences are a working library, not a mood board. These are the practitioners whose drawings still sit on the bench when something difficult shows up.
The grammar of the rectangle. Primary colors as structural decisions, not as decoration.
Workshop as classroom. The maker and the designer are the same person — a position this practice still takes.
The desert house as a precise instrument. Steel that disappears so the view doesn't.
Honest joints, repeatable parts, warmth in the geometry. A standard the shop keeps coming back to.
Less, but also: more careful. A bar of steel finished correctly does more than a panel finished sloppily.
Frey, Lautner, Wright. Buildings that took the desert seriously — and the metalwork that holds them up.
Mobile fabrication and on-site installation across five states. A project doesn't get held up shipping a sixteen-foot piece of steel.
Free first conversation. Mike answers his own email and reads every drawing himself. If we're not the right shop for it, we'll usually know in twenty minutes, and very likely tell you who is.