Inside the 80,000 square foot facility on Martinez Lane in Wylie, Savage Precision Fabrication manufactures custom parts for combat aircraft, missiles and radars. Jeremy Hallock/The Wylie News

Savage Precision Fabrication is not your average machine shop. 

In fact, this almost 50-year-old company — primarily an aerospace and defense supplier, manufactures precision parts for its main customers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. 

The Wylie company builds mechanical parts for combat aircrafts like the F-35 Lightning II, F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-22 Raptor — along with pieces for missiles and radars.

“There’s a very large demand for our parts right now,” Director of Marketing and Sales Kevin McEuen said. “With the unrest in the Middle East as well as Ukraine, there has been a large surge in the production of military aircraft and military weapons.”

In front of the entrance to the building at 1415 Martinez Lane, there is an oversized granite arrowhead in the sidewalk. Above the entrance, next to the name of the business, there is another arrowhead. Inside, the walls are decorated with Native American artwork and artifacts. 

Savage’s founder, W.T. Gardner, who died in 2013, was proud of his Choctaw Indian heritage. He started the business from his home in 1973 while working as a machinist for Texas Instruments.

“T.I. needed some parts that were very difficult to make,” McEuen said. “He laughed at them and said he could make them in his garage.”

Gardner was able to manufacture complicated mechanical parts for T.I. in his garage, which eventually led to him strike out on his own and officially open a facility in Garland two years later. Before long, the growing company moved to a 40,000 square foot space in downtown Wylie, which then followed with a move to Martinez Lane to its current 80,000 square foot home.

His widow, Jo Ann Gardner, still runs the business today as CEO and president.

“We help keep America safe,” Gardner said.

Savage turns raw materials into machine components with a precision of one-tenth of a thousandth of an inch.

“That would basically be taking one of your hairs and splitting it ten ways and taking one of those splits and splitting it ten different ways,” McEuen said. “An F-16 is comprised of about 350,000 parts per plane. If you add all the nuts and bolts and rivets and everything, it’s about 5 million parts.”

For traceability, defense industry protocols require Savage to keep both hard copies and electronic copies of every part they make. The company can provide the history of its parts starting with the ore being dug out of the ground. The protocols also require the company to hire American citizens and use all domestic materials.

“Our specialty is the small clips and brackets and components,” McEuen said. “It all starts with just a small clip that fastens to something else which fastens to something else, all the way up to the big fuselage.”

Aircraft parts cannot be cut with lasers, McEuen said, because it makes the metal brittle. Savage has water jets that use streams of water set at about 60,000 PSI to cut through three-inch armor plates with no heat.

McEuen says the company struggles to recruit employees with machining experience, which is why they have always worked with the Wylie Economic Corporation for Manufacturing Day.

“Machinists are a dying breed right now,” McEuen said. “Manufacturing Day teaches students that if you go through a trade school you can make as much, if not more, than those who go to college.”