Architectural Roof & Facade Innovations

The client need

In mid 2006, Hartmut Reichelt, ARFI’s co-founder, needed some laser cutting for their building cladding panels and ended up buying Metco’s old Trumph punching machine which has served them well for many jobs.

He also wanted help with cutting panels on small runs of product variants with short turnaround … at a cost competitive to doing it in-house.

The Metco experience in the client’s words

“Our projects included Chews Lane inner-city apartment block, ANZ Bank footpath ‘awning’, and HIBS high school extension buildings. Everything had to be precise, even, and matching for a fine finish.

Metco were in a different league to us, with a better setup, speed, and ‘agility’ to do small jobs efficiently and economically, saving us the time doing it ourselves. With those advantages, they had impressive cutting precision down to tenths of a mm.

They also made a roll-former machine/tool for us to efficiently create roof cladding with the exact profiles we needed.

Metco provided a very high level of service and went to extra lengths to meet our needs, even with tight timeframes. In all of this, they were easy to approach, with a friendly personal touch, so we’ve developed a very good relationship with them, which is important to us.

It hasn’t been just about money and squeezing every last cent. We didn’t want to have to shop around for the lowest price supplier on every item – it would be too much hassle and time-consuming.”