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Sparks fly for most of the world only on special occasions. But for Larry Plaisted, who spends long days grinding and welding metal and tempering it at the forge, sparks just come with the territory.
Of course, there was that special day a little more than a year ago when an ember found a wad of oily rags on the shop floor. Plaisted had just finished grinding a few rotary lawn mower blades and had stepped away to fire up his forge.
“I heard a noise and looked up,” he said, “and the back wall of the shop was ablaze.”
The burn began an 18-month odyssey to rebuild Plaisted’s Millmark Products Corp. The Ellsworth business had grown gradually over decades by sharpening everything from scissors and kitchen knives to large-scale saw blades used by lumber mills. It’s a tough way to make a living, a business that runs at high-volume, with rock-bottom prices. It is labor intensive enough to have the 53-year-old Limerick native out of the house, at the grinding wheel, before 7 a.m.
The metalworker had grabbed a fire extinguisher on that particular June morning and was headed for the flames. Then he remembered he’d turned on the propane to start the forge. With fire licking the ceiling in front of him and a cloud of propane gathering behind him, Plaisted’s survival instinct kicked in. He dropped the extinguisher and sprinted for the shop door, 80 feet away.
“I ran the length of the shop, got to the door and heard a ‘whuff,'” he said.
He turned and saw a wall of flame racing toward him, spread out over the 40-foot width of the floor. The pressure slammed the door shut. Plaisted got it open and slipped outside just before an explosion punched a 10-foot hole in the garage door. Just up the drive at the house, Vicki Plaisted dialed 911.
The call came in to Ellsworth Fire Department at 7:43 a.m. Fire crews were on the scene at Red Bridge Road 11 minutes later. They found a fire turbocharged by a propane line, by a ton of coal stored under the stairs, by more than a dozen oxyacetylene welding canisters and by countless containers of solvents.
“The overhead door was bowed out [from the explosion] dramatically when we got there,” said Ellsworth Fire Chief Robert McKenney. “And there was heavy fire in the back half of the building.”
Incredibly, an inch-and-a-half-thick piece of foam insulation across a second-floor doorway acted as an air block, preventing the fire from spreading up the stairway of the three-story, 8,500-square-foot shop.
“An open stairway works just like a chimney,” McKenney said. “We were totally amazed that that styrofoam kept that fire back long enough until we could put it out.”
After the fire, there was some good news for Plaisted. It started with the fact that, other than some irritation from smoke inhalation, he was uninjured. The fire only gutted the first floor of the building he and his son, Corey, had built five years earlier. His equipment was insured for $330,000.
The bad news, Plaisted learned, was that it would cost more than $700,000 to replace the special sharpening equipment, knife grinders, metal folding equipment and post grinders he had amassed over the years.
Plaisted acquired much of that equipment from others in sharpening trade who opted to board up shop over the years. Fewer sawmills, and a world where consumers tend to replace rather than resharpen everything from scissors to circular saw blades have made tradesmen able to hone an edge increasingly hard to find.
To carve out his own success, Plaisted, a former industrial arts instructor who taught at Brewer High School and at George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, keeps his price list carefully manicured: cold chisels and kitchen shears, $3.50 each. Stump grinder blades and countersinks, $4.50. A 21-foot, 3/8-inch band saw blade, $10.06.
Last week someone walked into the shop with a pair of cuticle clippers. Plaisted sharpened them for $3.
“The biggest expense of being in business is labor,” said Putt Patten, owner of Ellsworth Chain Saw Sales, one of Millmark’s customers. “When Larry recuts a blade for $5 or $6, I wonder how he does it.”
Since building the new shop on his 47-acre property in 1998, Plaisted pulled in increasing revenue, clearing more than $280,000 in 2001. Millmark was hurt by a series of bankruptcies among customers in 2002, driving sales to below $150,000.
A crucial key to earning any income on that revenue, Plaisted said, is having the right equipment. After the fire, however, his insurance company would only replace a portion of the equipment that had allowed him to process such high volume at a profit.
His shop temporarily out of commission, Plaisted bought some key pieces of equipment and partnered up in the summer of 2003 with a commercial sharpening service in Hermon. But Millmark’s partner had problems of its own. By the time the company declared bankruptcy in January, it had borrowed almost $90,000 of Plaisted’s insurance money attempting to stay afloat.
Out of a building once again and with his insurance money draining away fast, Plaisted took stock of his circumstances.
Millmark still had its basic crew intact. Its three route drivers worked on commission picking up tools and blades needing sharpening from lumber yards and mills, hardware stores and equipment shops throughout Maine and into New Hampshire. It had a strong base of loyal customers and pick-up sites, including EBS Building Supplies, Viking Lumber, rental shops like Granville and Taylor, and lumber mills including White’s in Blue Hill and Hancock in Casco.
Another advantage was Plaisted’s two solid employees, Corey Plaisted, his son, and Eric Haslem of Ellsworth, both of whom he trained himself.
The crew moved what equipment they had back into the partially repaired ground floor of the burned Millmark shop. They began salvaging what little they could of the burned equipment and worked double-time to get the space back in order.
By last summer, Plaisted said the business was back to better than original condition. A good cutting year for lumber and for lawns has helped push revenue to Millmark’s best year so far.
Plaisted said the company will nevertheless sharpen anything that comes through the door. As for the shop, the grinders have all been moved away from the walls. The walls are finished with fire-rated drywall. The forge, with its coal and motor oil for tempering, has its own dedicated area.
And although sparks still fly every workday, piles of oily rags are now taboo.
“We don’t make the same mistakes twice,” Plaisted said.
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