Dixon’s Trotter transforms metal into one-of-a-kind art pieces

DIXON — The sounds of metal meeting machinery can often be heard in a north side Dixon neighborhood when Trobey Trotter is home from his day job. The whir of a sander. The whizzing of a saw. Clangs and creaks. A press pouring on the pressure.

It’s the sound of art in progress.

It’s also the daily grind of metalworking – but it’s anything but tedious. For Trotter, it’s a sense of pride in transforming hunks of metal into creative creations. Some people use a paint brush or colored pencils in their art, but not Trotter: he wields saws, jigs and sanders to churn out one-of-a-kind pieces.

Trotter is the mind behind the metal work at Trobey’s Forge, where he’s spent the past six years honing his craft. Whether it’s a sign, a key holder or bringing a family crest to life, Trotter’s mind is always coming up with ways to rise to the creative challenge.

“People don’t always look at this as art,” Trotter said. “It is, because I’m drawing it out on a computer and I still need that mental component to do that.”

The forge combines Trotter’s background in manufacturing, computer-aided design drawing and his interests in history, science fiction and fantasy. Some of his most recent include a shelf inspired by the “TARDIS” time travel machine from the British show “Doctor Who,” shields from the video game series “Zelda,” and Klingon and Romulan emblems from “Star Trek.”

Trotter also does commissioned work for customers, such as business signs and welcome signs. He works out the details with customers – helping them determine the best size for a piece, its center of interest, what fonts fit best – and then works up the design and fires up the tools. For most of his projects, he’ll plasma cut a flat piece of metal with designs in the middle, form them with a box-and-pan brake tool, clean the metal with an orbital palm sander, and then powder coat it to add color.

With years of experience under his belt, Trotter has gotten pretty good at mastering metal. As he says on his Facebook page: “I make what you can think up!”

Trotter is sharing his talents in his hometown after spending a couple of decades away. A 1994 Dixon High School graduate, Trotter lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for nearly 20 years before coming back home a few years ago to take care of his father. Back in Minnesota, he worked in manufacturing for a few years before he, in his own words, “got too old” for the work. Then he turned to drafting, learned a new skill and found a new passion at Anoka Technical College in Anoka, Minnesota.

As he learned new skills, he combined them with his background in manufacturing and his interest in fantasy, fiction and adventure. The combination led him to try his hand at creating shields and other armor used in centuries gone by.

As with any new skill, it took some time and trial and error to master it – “I was unfortunately ruining more than what I was making,” Trotter said – but eventually practice made perfect and Trotter got the pieces to his liking. Once he mastered the technique he was able to tap into his creativity.

“Then I had someone ask me, ‘So you did this, can you do that?’ It became way deeper than I expected, but it just kind of progressed from there, and I’m like, ‘You know what, I can do this.’ I started doing signs, and then whatever else that came out of my head.”

While still in Minnesota, his clientele was limited to friends and coworkers, but since he came back home to Dixon, he’s pushed himself to share his talents with the community. He’s set up tables at the Dixon City Market, The Next Picture Show’s Nuts About Art festival, the Grand Detour Arts Festival, and Boggio’s Orchard in Granville.

Sometimes sales have been good, and other times not as much, but it’s all part of the learning curve. Seeing how people respond to different items helps him learn what sells well and what doesn’t.

“Just because I like something, it doesn’t mean I have the same interests as other people,” Trotter said. “I’m trying to find that market niche of what other people would like so I don’t make too many of one that nobody wants.”

Trotter is always looking for new ideas and sometimes he finds them at his job as a mechanical designer for Sewer Equipment in town. The idea of a metal dispenser for foam can koozies was inspired by a co-worker. Once he had the idea, he began to design it in his head, before sketching it out on paper, before working up the final design on computer.

“Everyone has a bag or a drawer of Koozies somewhere if they drink,” Trotter said. “One of the guys at work asked me, ‘Can you make a Koozie dispenser?’ Well, I know what a Koozie looks like, I had one at my desk, and I measured it out.”

Sometimes, he even gets inspiration from leftovers. Trotter was able to take scraps from the Koozie holder project and turn them into score markers for the cornhole yard game.

“My brain went, ‘I don’t want to throw these away,’ so I just kept them,” Trotter said. “I have a little bit of an environmentalist side, so I don’t like waste. Financially, I don’t like waste, either. I could do something with all of that. I’ve gotten better about not having a giant tub of material sitting in the corner thinking, ‘I could use this somewhere.’ That’s what defined my scorekeepers for cornhole; when I do these Koozie holders, I always have a strip about this wide and about that long.”

Trotter also sells his creations on the crafting website Etsy. Some of his works have gone as far as Australia, Portugal and the Netherlands.

He’s also found ways to be creative in his shipping process. For instance, when he needed to ship a 28-inch dragonfly he made, he designed it so that it could be taken apart and re-assembled for easier shipping.

“I like history, and I was watching [on TV] about how big bugs used to be back in the prehistoric era,” Trotter said. “It was 28 inches. Part of the challenge that I enjoy with making stuff like this – and hate – is that shipping is expensive. I needed to figure out how to ship this thing. Part of the design process is that I have to go into it and see where I can break it down simple enough that other people can put it together.”

Down the road, Trotter can see a day when his metal crafting is the only work he does.

“I would like to eventually make this the only thing I’m doing,” Trotter said. “It comes down to trying to find that product line, and find the vein of what people want and like and getting a customer base. With Etsy, I’ve done pretty well.”

In doing so, he’ll be sure to leave no scrap unturned.

“There’s money on my table,” Trotter said. “I have to find it.”

Get glimpses of Trobey Trotter’s works on Facebook at Trobey’s Forge; as well as Instagram and Twitter (both @Trobeysforge). Contact Trotter through any social media platform to arrange a work.

Go to etsy.com/shop/trobeysforge to browse through Trotter’s works for sale.