A Return To My Roots

DFMA Engineering is a return to my roots. During my senior year of high school, I was torn between becoming a professional musician and an engineer. Ultimately, I decided to pursue engineering, and I was accepted at North Carolina State University to begin in the fall semester of 1983. That summer, before I headed off to Raleigh, I worked as a drafter for an engineering company in my hometown of Boone, North Carolina. Homebuilders would come in and have out-of-the ordinary designs or construction problems that needed structural review and analysis. Our licensed professional engineer would do the analysis, I would draft the design (paper and pencil in those days), then the engineer would seal the drawing with his stamp and signature. I thought that this was a pretty interesting job as a drafter, but I thought the engineer’s job was even more interesting.

Much later, after a detour in which I started and ran a cabinet shop for eight years, I went to see that engineer to talk about mechanical engineering, which was his discipline. I was ready to leave the cabinet business, and while I wanted to finish my degree in engineering, I wanted to be sure that I was choosing the right type of engineering when I went back to school. I chose mechanical engineering, and it was absolutely the right choice.

I’m one of those people who can’t help being an engineer—it’s in my DNA. In the forty-two years since I worked for that engineering company, I have been in some sort of manufacturing environment or other continuously, solving problems and building things: cabinets, optical fiber, asphalt shingles, medical devices and airplane seats to name a few. And I’ve done all of this in a hands-on manner. I am as comfortable with a wrench or hammer in my hand as with a calculator.

I ask for the hard problems because I enjoy solving them. Sometimes when I first look at a tough problem, it’s hard to see how there can be any solution at all, let alone a good one. But I’ve been able to find them.

Once I graduated, it was always my intent to get my professional engineering licensure (I did in 2015) and start an engineering business (I did four years later, as a side gig). With over forty years of experience building things (and over twenty-five of those as an engineer), what I’m building now is DFMA Engineering and strengthening my roots. If you’re a home builder or home owner and you have any sort of residential construction issue, I’m here for it. And if it’s a hard one, so much the better. I’ll find a solution.