What's The Point? In addition to being perhaps the sexiest and most dangerous chunk of aluminum the world has ever known, it's the sharp new trophy created for EXHIBITOR Magazine's Exhibit Design Awards.

The symbol of international exhibit-design excellence, The Point is no ordinary trophy fabricated in a turnkey trophy shop. Similar to the HPs and Geek Squads of this world, The Point has a legacy all its own.

EXHIBITOR commissioned this one-of-a-kind trophy design in early March 2006. With a small-scale model of The Point in hand, EXHIBITOR staff initially set out to find a turnkey trophy supplier. We soon abandoned the search, however, as nary a single supplier out of the roughly 25 companies we contacted could fabricate the 10-by-4-inch, angled, aluminum beauty.

Momentarily deterred but not defeated, we widened our search to include metal-fabrication, aluminum-casting, and molding companies. And that's when things got interesting.

While the metal-fabricator supplier search wasn't immediately successful, the characters we met along the way were well worth the countless hours and endless gallons of gas we spent combing the back roads of north Dallas' industrial parks. A prime example is the charming but gritty 70-something man we found holed up in the back of an aluminum-molding shop. Come to find out, he's the man who creates the molds for all of the door handles for Chili's restaurants and the aluminum and brass guitars that adorn the interior walls of the world's Hard Rock Cafes. Pair personalities such as these with the 10 to 15 “metal-shop dogs” we encountered along the way — with temperaments ranging from aloof to decidedly deadly — and you might say our whirlwind tour of the under belly of the Dallas metal-fabrication industry was both potentially hazardous and utterly fascinating.

Colorful characters and grease-soaked dogs aside, we still couldn't find a single shop that could create the quality and size trophy we needed — until we made a fateful phone call to Richard McGill Sr. of McGill's Propeller & Welding Inc., who not only plotted our course towards success and schooled us about everything we needed to know about metal fabrication (and plenty of stuff we didn't), but who eventually completed the final step in what would turn out to be a three-step fabrication process.

Michael D. Sampson
Sampson Enterprises Inc.
While McGill (heretofore referred to as Sparky) couldn't “get ‘er done” himself, he knew somebody that could start the process — namely the guy in the shop next door, Michael D. Sampson, president of Sampson Enterprises Inc. Working alongside an assortment of family dogs, Sampson — who lives up to his name at roughly 6-foot 4-inches tall and an easy 225 — has been fabricating everything from custom motorcycle parts to precision lens casings for the last 20 years. While Sampson's Lewisville, TX, shop didn't have the equipment and time necessary to fabricate the required 70 trophies, he created The Point prototype using little more than two hours of his time and a 12-by-6-inch chunk of scrap metal. His final contribution was a referral to the next stop on our fabrication safari: D&S Tool Inc. of Dallas, which had the machines and the manpower to fabricate all 70 trophies.

Charles Gilbert
D&S Tool Inc.
Charles Gilbert (for whom we quickly coined the name Smilin' Charlie) founded D&S Tool in 1983. D&S is located less than 100 yards from a set of well-traveled railroad tracks (with no safety arms or flashing lights, mind you) on an aptly named street called Distribution Way. As of April 2006, Gilbert added his first “cone-shaped trophy” to the firm's list of accomplishments. Fabricated using Gilbert's lathe, the lethal, yet stunning, trophies left his shop roughly two weeks later with a non-polished matte finish, which meant they were headed back to their starting point — McGill's (Sparky's) Propeller & Welding — for their final shine.

Richard McGill
McGill Propeller & Welding Inc.
For the McGills, family and business go hand in hand. While Richard Jr. (pictured here) and Richard Sr. work long hours in the 16-year-old shop (they arrived at 4 a.m. the day of our photo shoot), Mom works in the office and their family of three rat terriers guards the grease-caked grounds. Positioned roughly five miles from Lake Lewisville, a 23,000-acre recreational lake just north of Dallas, Sparky gets his share of propeller and welding work. However, April was down time, which meant the grinders and the McGills were free to polish 70 trophies to a mirror-like finish in less than 24 hours.

From prototype to final polish, The Point's multi-step fabrication process was certainly a lesson in perseverance — sometimes the 34th time's the charm, and you need a Sampson, a Sparky, and a Smilin' Charlie to complete the task. But the process also yielded a greater lesson about innovation. That is, if you want more of the same, look in the usual places. But if you want something truly unique, something that nobody else has dared to consider, start your search on the fringes of possibility — where the real problem-solvers live and breathe, and where the world's greatest ideas are forged.

Photos: Shane Kislack Photography