Carlson Sheet Metal Works Inc., a longtime Spokane fabricator of metal products, doesn't go for routine projects, but rather tries to maintain a niche in specialty and custom work. The company's one-time jobs include manufacturing a steel frame for a lighthouse, and modifying an airplane fuselage for physical rehabilitation and training.

The shop currently operates with 14 core employees, down from its peak of more than 50 employees in the mid-2000s when the economy and the custom home market was booming, says Brian Fair, the company's president and owner.

Fair declines to disclose the company's revenues, but says this year's revenues likely will be the lowest in several years. He adds, however, that Carlson Sheet Metal has bid for a number of jobs within the last two months with a total value exceeding last year's revenues.

Much of that work, though, is planned for 2012, and funding for some of it isn't in place yet, he says.

Fair is a third-generation principal in the company, which his grandfather, Dan Fair, bought from Carlson Sheet Metal's namesake, Conrad Carlson, in 1952. Brian Fair's father, Roy Fair, led the company in the late 1980s. In 1997, at the age of 31, Brian Fair took over the business when his father died.

Fair says the strength of the company comes from the longevity of its employees, who through experience have developed skills needed for custom projects of all sizes. Four employees were hired by his grandfather, and the rest worked under his father, he says.

One of this year's most visible projects involved modifying a section of a commercial passenger airplane fuselage and installing it at St. Luke's Community, at St. Luke's Rehabilitation Institute, in Spokane. The Community program enables physical rehabilitation patients to practice skills of everyday life, including boarding a plane.

The fuselage, donated by Southwest Airlines and shipped here from the United Kingdom, came with the original seats and wiring, and was too big to bring into St. Luke's Community in one piece. It also was too big for the space St. Luke's had allocated for it.

"We started with a fuselage that was 12 feet wide and 25 feet long," he says.

St. Luke's airplane module had room for a section of plane 9 feet wide and 15 feet long.

"We cut it apart and put it together inside the building," he says. "If you weren't familiar with the plane, you wouldn't know that it's any smaller in width."

Fair says the project was a challenge from the beginning when he created a budget for it without seeing the project first hand.

"I bid the project from a picture of the plane," he says.

Carlson Sheet Metal completed the project last month.

The company's showcase project last year was a light gallery with a steel base installed atop a 62-foot-tall lighthouse structure that's the centerpiece of a $1 million revitalization of Clover Island on the Columbia River, north of downtown Kennewick, Wash.

Carlson Sheet Metal fabricated the gallery and base at its shop here and transported it to Clover Island, where the contractor installed the 23,000-pound assembly. The base is an 8-foot-tall steel cylinder with a doorway that provides access onto the 44-foot high observation deck of the lighthouse.

Carlson Sheet Metal got that job through connections with Spokane architectural firm Pondera Architecture PC. Pondera asked Fair to estimate the cost for the 18-foot-tall light gallery and its steel base to go atop the structure's observation deck, so the Port of Kennewick could determine whether the lighthouse project was feasible.

"We built the budget and then had to bid the job to get it," he says. Four other companies also bid for the job.

Fair says Carlson's Sheet Metal's most recent projects ranged in price from a $35 decorative item to $600,000 for work it did on a custom home in the exclusive Black Rock golf community above Lake Coeur d'Alene's Rockford Bay. Work at that home included installing an exterior siding system with aluminum-composite and wood-fiber architectural panels, he says.

"It was one of the most expensive residential projects we've ever worked on," Fair says.

Carlson Sheet Metal also fabricates kitchen hoods, outdoor kitchens, wrought iron railings, yard lights and other decorative items for custom homes.

The company can start jobs now almost immediately after securing them, unlike a few years ago, when it had a healthy backlog , Fair says.

"It's a different economy. Work now usually is done within 60 days from start to installation," he says. "We just don't have a backlog."

Most fabrication work is done at 3621 E. Broadway, where Carlson Sheet Metal occupies 14,000 square feet of floor space.

Most of the company's production starts with flat metal sheets, up to an inch thick and weighing up to 3,200 pounds.

"We add value to the metal sheet," he says. "We cut, roll, bend, weld, and finish it."

Carlson Sheet Metal also often installs the parts and products it fabricates.

Machines called press brakes are used to bend the sheets to specified angles. The largest is a hydraulic press brake able to put 600,000 pounds of pressure per square inch along a 20-foot-long half-inch-thick metal plate.

The press brake looks like a giant, slow moving guillotine, in which the hydraulically powered blade presses the sheet into a $15,000 hardened-metal die that forms the angle of the bend.

Carlson Sheet Metal bought that press brake in 1974, and it enabled the company to fabricate parts for such heavyweight customers as Kaiser Aluminum Corp.

With its emphasis now on custom projects, the only jobs that resemble routine work are maintenance-and-repair jobs.

"We provide behind-the-scenes support for bakeries and food services," he says.

Even that can offer unusual opportunities, he says.

At the Franz Family Bakery plant in Spokane Valley, for instance, Carlson Sheet Metal replaced the tile floor in its proofing room with quarter-inch steel plate, because regular flooring materials wore out quickly under 2,000 pound carts of dough that were placed there for yeast fermentation, Fair says.

In addition to the weight of the dough, the flooring material must withstand 90-percent humidity and temperatures above 100 degrees, he says.