The sheet metal trade and your apprenticeship

Kai Ferreira's first morning at Keelson Sheet Metal started at 6:45 in the lunchroom, with a hard hat that still had the store sticker on it and a pair of steel-toed boots that had not yet been rained on. Keelson is a mid-sized sheet metal contractor in an industrial district on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. It has a fabrication shop of about 20,000 square feet, three delivery trucks, and field crews that install ductwork, kitchen exhaust, architectural flashing and metal roofing across the region. Halima Noor, who owns the company, had hired Kai as a first-year apprentice after a summer as a shop helper. Walt Szymanski, the shop foreman, handed him a time card and a safety orientation binder. Aggie MacLeod, a journeyworker with twenty-two years in the trade, would be his mentor.

"You'll be in the shop for most of this year," Walt said. "The field crews will borrow you when they need hands. By the end of the year you'll know every machine in here, what every material is, and how not to get hurt doing any of it." This course follows Kai through that first year in the shop. It covers the tools, machines and materials of the trade and the safe work practices that go with them. Later courses in the program cover pattern development, seams and joints, duct fabrication, welding, field installation, architectural work, balancing, industrial ventilation and estimating. This first lesson describes the trade itself and how an apprenticeship in it works.

What sheet metal workers do

Sheet metal workers fabricate, assemble, install and maintain products made from thin metal: usually steel, aluminum, stainless steel and copper from about 0.016 in up to about 1/8 in thick, and sometimes thicker. The trade is defined by the material and by the skill of turning a flat sheet into a three-dimensional shape that fits. A worker lays out a pattern on a flat sheet, cuts it, bends and forms it, joins the pieces with seams, fasteners, solder or welds, and installs the finished product where it belongs.

Most of the work falls into a few broad areas. Heating, ventilating and air conditioning ductwork is the largest: rectangular, round and oval duct, fittings, dampers, plenums and the hangers that hold them up. Kitchen exhaust and industrial ventilation is a specialized branch: grease ducts and hoods, dust collection, fume exhaust. Architectural sheet metal covers flashing, gutters, roofing, wall cladding, copings and ornamental work. There is also a wide range of specialty fabrication, from stainless steel counters and equipment for food service and hospitals to machine guards, enclosures and custom parts. Some sheet metal workers specialize in testing, adjusting and balancing air systems, in shop drawings and estimating, or in running computer-controlled cutting and coil lines.

At Keelson, the work on the board on Kai's first day showed most of those areas at once. A crew was replacing the ductwork at Ashgrove Elementary School as part of an HVAC retrofit that would run through the summer. The shop was building a stainless steel kitchen exhaust hood and grease duct for Brine & Ember, a new restaurant downtown. The architectural crew was measuring the roof of St. Brendan's Church, a heritage building whose copper roof and flashings needed restoration. And the estimating office was working on the sheet metal package for the new wing at Eastgate Hospital, the largest job Keelson had bid in years. Those four jobs come up again and again in this program.

Shop and field

Sheet metal work happens in two places, and an apprentice needs to be comfortable in both. In the shop, material arrives in flat sheets and coils, and it is cut, formed and assembled on machines that are too large to take to a job site: squaring shears, brakes, roll formers, notchers, plasma tables and coil lines. Shop work is precise and repetitive, and it rewards care with layout and machines. In the field, the finished pieces are carried, lifted, hung, connected and sealed, often overhead, often around other trades, and often in weather. Field work rewards planning, communication and attention to the building as it really is rather than as the drawings say it is.

The two halves depend on each other. A fitting that is a quarter inch out in the shop can cost an hour in the field, and a field measurement taken carelessly can waste a day of shop time. Walt's rule was that every apprentice should spend time on both sides so that shop workers understand what the field needs and field workers understand what the shop can do. Kai would spend most of his first year in the shop and help on field jobs when a crew needed an extra pair of hands.

How an apprenticeship works

In the United States, there is no national license for sheet metal workers, and Ohio does not license the trade at the state level. Most sheet metal workers learn through registered apprenticeship programs, which are approved by the US Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency; in Ohio that is ApprenticeOhio, part of the state's Department of Job and Family Services. Many programs are run by joint apprenticeship training committees of the sheet metal workers' union, SMART, and the contractors who employ its members, many of whom belong to the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association, SMACNA. Keelson is a union contractor, so Kai was indentured as an apprentice in the local joint program. Such programs typically last four to five years and combine several thousand hours of paid work with classroom and shop training each year, much of it built on curriculum from the industry's national training institute. Non-union contractors run registered programs of their own, and some cities and counties license the contractors who do HVAC work.

The classroom training is usually spread through the year, often in evening or day-release classes at the training center, with exams at each level. When the apprentice completes the required hours and classes, the program issues a certificate of completion, and the apprentice becomes a journeyworker. Some states and cities test and license sheet metal workers or HVAC installers, and many employers also look for industry certifications. The last course in this program, SMW-430, reviews the trade for journeyworker exams and covers leading a crew.

Pay rises as the apprentice progresses. An apprentice's wage is set as a percentage of a journeyworker's rate, and the percentage steps up at each level, so finishing the technical training on time and keeping the hours logged has a direct effect on the paycheck. The apprentice also has responsibilities: to work safely, to attend the technical training, to keep an accurate record of hours and skills, and to learn. The employer must provide supervision by qualified workers, a range of work that covers the trade, and the time to attend school.

The logbook

Aggie's first piece of advice was not about tools. "Write everything down. Hours, what you did, who you did it with. When you get to the end, nobody remembers what you did in your first year except you and your book." An apprentice's logbook records hours worked and the skills practiced, and the employer signs it. The training standard for the trade lists the tasks an apprentice must be able to do, and the logbook shows when and where each was done. A gap in the log can delay a level change or the final exam, so Kai filled in his hours every Friday before he left the shop.

The script below is the kind of check Kai's training coordinator ran for every apprentice. It takes the program's required hours, the hours logged so far and a typical week, and estimates how long it will take to finish. It is a planning tool only; the real requirements are the ones the program sets.

# How long until the apprenticeship hours are complete?
required = 8000          # hours the program requires
logged = 410            # hours logged so far
week = 40             # hours worked in a typical week
weeks_per_year = 44    # weeks worked in a year, after school blocks and holidays
left = required - logged
weeks = left / week
years = weeks / weeks_per_year
print(f"hours still needed: {left}")
print(f"at {week} hours a week: {weeks:.0f} working weeks, about {years:.1f} years")
for share in (0.25, 0.50, 0.75):
    print(f"{int(share * 100)} % of the hours is reached at {required * share:.0f} hours")

hours still needed: 7590
at 40 hours a week: 190 working weeks, about 4.3 years
25 % of the hours is reached at 2000 hours
50 % of the hours is reached at 4000 hours
75 % of the hours is reached at 6000 hours

The 8,000-hour figure is a planning number used in the script; the local program's own standards set the actual hours, which vary between programs. With 410 hours from his summer as a helper counting toward the total, Kai had a little over four years ahead of him.

Who's who on a sheet metal job

On a construction project, the sheet metal contractor is usually a subcontractor to a mechanical contractor or directly to the general contractor. The engineer designs the HVAC system and produces the drawings and specifications. The sheet metal contractor turns those drawings into shop drawings that show every piece of duct with its size, gauge and joints, fabricates the pieces, and installs them in coordination with the plumbers, pipefitters, electricians, sprinkler fitters and others who need the same ceiling space. On architectural work, the sheet metal contractor may work for the roofing contractor or the general contractor, and the details come from the architect.

Within Keelson, Halima runs the company and signs the contracts. The estimators price jobs before they are won. The detailer, Lin Zhao, draws shop drawings and programs the plasma table. Walt runs the shop, decides what gets built in what order and who builds it. In the field, Sean Doucette is the general foreman, and each job has a foreman or lead hand who runs the crew. Journeyworkers do the skilled work and train apprentices. Apprentices learn by doing, under supervision, and gradually take on more.

What the trade asks of you

Sheet metal work asks for a particular set of abilities. The first is spatial thinking: seeing how a flat pattern will fold into a shape, and how a fitting will sit in a building. The second is arithmetic and geometry, used every day for layout, allowances and quantities; the pattern development courses later in the program rely on it heavily. The third is hand skill with tools and machines, which comes only with practice. The fourth is physical: carrying sheets and duct, working on ladders and lifts, and standing at a bench for long hours. And the fifth, the one Aggie said mattered most, is care: measuring twice, keeping hands out of machines, and finishing work that someone else will have to live with.

The trade also changes. Duct is increasingly cut on plasma tables and formed on coil lines driven by software. Building codes keep tightening limits on duct leakage, which puts more weight on good seams and sealing. Kitchen exhaust and fire-rated assemblies require close attention to listings and codes. Architectural metal work has grown with metal roofing and cladding. A sheet metal worker who keeps learning has a long career with many directions: field foreman, shop foreman, detailer, estimator, project manager, balancing technician, inspector or instructor.

At the end of the first day, Aggie walked Kai around the shop once more, naming each machine and pointing out its guards and stop buttons. "You don't touch any of these until somebody has shown you," she said. "That's not because we think you're careless. It's because every one of them can take a finger in less time than it takes to say so." The next lesson is about exactly that.