on the Same Floor.
Four Decades of Precision. One Floor in Lakeland, Florida.
DEC Metals has been processing sheet and plate in Polk County since 1980 — long enough to have seen every way a job can go wrong, and long enough to have built a shop that doesn't let it.
We didn't set out to be everything. We set out to be exact.
DEC Metals opened in Lakeland in 1980, and the business has stayed in the family ever since. What started as a metalworking shop has become something narrower and considerably harder: a dedicated processing operation running high-definition plasma, heavy press brake forming, and multi-axis CNC machining under a single roof.
That narrowing was deliberate. Plenty of shops in Florida will sell you steel, and plenty will fabricate whatever walks through the door. Doing both well is rare, and doing either one fast while doing it right is rarer still. So we stopped trying to be a supply house and became a processing partner instead — the shop other shops call when the tolerance is tight and the schedule is tighter.
Four decades in, the equipment has changed completely and the standard hasn't changed at all. A part either meets the print or it doesn't.
Family owned. Owner operated. Still on the floor.
DEC Metals is run by the Maxwell family — Cory, Eric, and Stacey Maxwell — and that matters more in this business than it might in another. When you call about a job, you are talking to people who can walk out to the machine and look at your part. Not a call center. Not a broker three states away who will “check with the shop and get back to you.”
It also means accountability has a name on it. Our estimators quote work that our own people run on our own equipment. If something needs to be made right, there is no chain of vendors to work back through — there's a family whose name is on the building.
“High-precision, easy to do business with, on-time and on-target.”
Four things we stopped negotiating on.
Engineering-grade precision
Tolerances, bevels and cuts executed to exact specification, so parts fit on the first try. Nobody on your floor should be grinding a part to make the drawing work.
Operational velocity
Aggressive turnarounds on complex, multi-step processing. Your throughput measured against your schedule — not our backlog.
Frictionless partnership
Straight answers from in-house estimators, honest status on every job, and flexible staging built around how B2B trade actually runs.
Industrial integrity
Four decades of hands-on metalworking. Established 1980, still family-run, still on the floor.
Three buyers. Three ways we take the risk out of the schedule.
Named programs, named decision makers, and a value proposition written for each — so estimators and procurement teams recognize themselves immediately.
What's actually in the building.
Four service lines, sequenced so a multi-step job never leaves the property.
High Performance
Thermal Cutting
Heavy Plate
Forming & Shearing
Advanced CNC
Machining & Sawing
Production Prep
& Staging
Every operation above is quoted, run, and staged in-house. No brokered secondary operations. No third-party lead times layered on top of ours.
Lakeland is home. It isn't the boundary.
We sit in the middle of the I-4 corridor — an hour from Tampa, an hour from Orlando, and within a day's freight of most of the Southeast. Because we compete on capability rather than proximity, the work travels well. Distance is a logistics question. It has never been a quality one.
Forty-five years of practice. Put it to work.
Send drawings, a cut list, or a bill of materials and our estimators will quote it in-house.