MORENCI — A humble blacksmith shop in the 1920s provided the roots for a family-run business that has been part of Morenci’s fabric for some 45 years now.
That blacksmith shop’s offshoot opened the door in the 1970s to WR Production Welding, which was owned by Wendell Glaser and operated by James Roth. When that company went bankrupt in 1979, some of its customers asked Roth and his late wife, Rita, if they would open their own related business.
The result was Roth Fabricating Inc., which has been serving customers in a wide variety of industries since 1980.
The company, located at 9600 Skyline Drive in Morenci, provides a full range of start-to-finish metal fabricating and assembly services including laser cutting, welding, CNC machining, and more.
Roth Fabricating is now in its third generation of family ownership. After Jim and Rita retired in 2000, they sold the business to two of Rita’s children, Shane Sarnac and Simone Haas.
Sarnac’s grandfather worked for that long-ago blacksmith and took over when the blacksmith died, transforming the business into a place that did welding and frame repair and fixed farm implements. Glaser was Sarnac’s uncle.
By 2004, Roth Fabricating had outgrown its home at that time, a converted laundromat in uptown Morenci, and had moved into a new building, since greatly expanded, at its current location.
Sarnac later bought Haas out and two other family members came on board as partners: Jim and Rita’s grandson Jason Wilson and Joel Swett, nephew of Sarnac’s wife, Jeanie. Jeanie also worked for the company for many years before retiring.
Many other family members have been part of the company over the years as well. One of those is Lauren Wilson, Jason’s daughter-in-law, who works for the business now and expects to take the reins in due time as the fourth generation to run Roth Fabricating.
“I’ve been talking to Jason about it for years,” Lauren said. To her, it’s all about “carrying on the family legacy and the culture of it.”
Swett said he’s excited to see the family’s younger members, like Lauren, become part of the business. “I hope they make a career out of it,” he said.
Not surprisingly in a family-run business, all of the kids did their part as they grew up, doing anything from cleaning to bending tubes to sitting at the family’s kitchen table putting together windshield wiper lines.
Of course, when you run your own company, trade-offs sometimes have to be made where the business’s needs come first. “Once, Rita wanted some carpeting and Jim wanted a forklift,” said Barb Roth, whom Jim married after Rita’s passing. “What do you think they got?”
“We never lived extravagantly, and we never took a lot of money out of [the business],” Sarnac said. “We always wanted to invest it in the company.”
Roth Fabricating has served a diverse array of customers over the years, doing “anything we could make money at,” Jim said.
“Jim is the kind of guy that could make anything work,” Sarnac said, and he and other family members began ticking off a list of some of those things: designing machines, repairing cars, even raising horses. “He’s just one of those guys who could figure out a way.”
And even at his age — 83 — “he’s like an Energizer Bunny,” Barb said. “He just never stops.”
Sarnac said that over the years, the company has worked with just about every factory within 50 miles of here. At one time, Jim handled a lot of work for the automotive industry, with one of their major customers being automotive supplier Fayette Tubular in nearby Fayette, Ohio. That company’s closure is what caused Roth’s business to pivot into doing metal fabricating because it was something the other companies couldn’t do for themselves.
The company bought its first laser for cutting parts, a used model, sometime after 2004, and then in 2008 bought its first new laser and some automation capabilities.
“And that’s when things really started to go,” Sarnac said. It proved to be an excellent investment, because the automation allows the laser to cut the needed patterns out of metal sheets all night long by reloading itself.
Today, Roth Fabricating creates everything from steel drains, to the superstructure needed to mount tow motors on the back of a Lowe’s or Home Depot truck, to pickup truck lift kits and other aftermarket parts, and more.
The demand for data centers and the need for metal to build them also means a lot of new work is available, and because U.S. tariffs are leading to shifts in where manufacturing is done, “we’ve seen a lot of positive stuff come from it,” Swett said.
Sarnac and the rest of the family are very intentional about making Roth Fabricating a place where their employees matter. “We all work here, and we’ve never considered that these people work for us,” he said.
“I don’t even like the term ‘boss,’ ” Swett added. “We’re all co-workers. We’re all trying to do the same job here. None of us is more important than the other.”
Symbolizing the family’s outlook on life and business, there’s a plaque hanging by the front office that reads “God Shop.”
“This business was given to us by the good Lord and we have to take advantage of that opportunity and treat people right,” Sarnac said. “Our employees have never been just a number to us.”
From where Jim first started out in business — “in a small horse barn with no employees,” he said — the company he and Rita founded almost five decades ago currently employs more than 40 people. Sarnac said that makes it one of the largest employers in Morenci, if not the largest other than the school system.
Besides what it does for the local employment picture, Roth Fabricating does a lot to be a good community partner, whether that’s being active with Little League, building a scoreboard and benches for the school district, doing welding work for the city, or donating money to local causes.
“Because the Lord has blessed us, we’re able to give back to the community,” Sarnac said. “And the city has been really good to us, too.”