Joe Kline / The Bulletin Scott Cunningham, CEO of ArcLight Dynamics, stands by one of the company’s new Arc Max plasma tables at the facility in Bend on Wednesday.

ArcLight Dynamics started as a sideline for founder and CEO Scott Cunningham, who expanded the company through the Great Recession to $4.5 million in sales last year.

Cunningham, who arrived in Bend in 2001, worked first as a counselor for Obsidian Trails, an outdoor program for troubled youth, and at NorthStar Center, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Bend, until it closed in 2011. Out of a job, he turned instead to his interest in building computer numeric controlled, or CNC, routers. Five years later, his interest has evolved into a company that makes automated tables equipped with plasma cutters, which other businesses use to turn steel plate into anything from monster-truck armor to works of art.

“I liked to build stuff when I was young,” Cunningham said. “Then I got the degree in counseling, and I did that for a while, but then I started building stuff, and I realized how much I loved it.”

He built 10 tables in his garage and sold them before stepping out full-time, leasing space and taking on an employee, then three more, all four of them former counselors and colleagues. Because they all started on the shop floor, making the units, and came from counseling backgrounds, the company prides itself on its patient and detailed approach to customer service. The company grew from Cunningham’s garage to a 2,500-square-foot shop to one four times that size and now ready to expand again.

He said he built the entirety of the business from the ground up, including the company website, videos and brochures.

“I produced them in-house myself. I did the original website; I did the original videos, taught myself how to use graphic design programs,” he said, “and it’s allowed us to grow and never have any debt since day one, basically.”

ArcLight Dynamic tables, which can weigh a ton and cost roughly $25,000, employ a plasma cutter to burn through steel, up to 1¼ inches in some cases, according to a pattern set by computer-assisted design and run by a computer. A plasma cutter combines an electric arc with a jet of compressed gas to produce a 30,000-degree plasma jet “that blows right through steel like it’s not even there,” Cunningham said. The heart of an ArcLight Dynamics table is a plasma cutter made by Hypertherm, a New Hampshire company.

Michelle Avila, a spokeswoman for Hypertherm, said ArcLight Dynamics is one of number of firms that employ plasma cutters in their own products. Those companies fill a niche, providing the basic setup that forms the core of a small business that can produce anything from signs to custom auto parts. It’s a growing market, she said.

“We don’t know why,” she said. “One theory is that baby boomers are retiring and this is a great way for them to start their own businesses. You can build pretty much anything you want with these tables.”

Scott Stites, of Sparks Metalcrafters, in Nevada, bought an ArcLight table in spring 2015 to produce metal flags and military insignia. He bought the table with no experience using plasma cutters, and, a year later, said sales are taking off.

“I have nothing but great things to say about those guys,” Stites said. “They are helping other businesses create jobs.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com

Q: Is your clientele today still the customer you talked about previously — the small business, the entrepreneur?

A: Scott Cunningham: Small manufacturers, small welding job shops, really anybody that works with metal. This equipment is a very cheap and inexpensive way to get into automation and really increase their productivity.

Q: What is your outlook for the next three to five years?

A: Last year we grew 40 percent; this year we’re on track to grow 50 percent. Probably this year we’ll do $6 million in sales. I have a goal of being at $10 million in two years. I think that’s easy; we might exceed that.

Q: You talked about your technical support. Do you have a lot of trouble with the machinery?

A: Right now, we probably have over 1,200 tables out on the market, easily, at this point. Yes, tech support is a daily thing when you have that many machines out, but I would say our machines are more reliable than the competitors’ by far. A lot of that comes down to customers who know how to use the equipment.