Thirty-Eight Years On Airport Rd
One shop, one address, two generations. Ironwake has never been a chain, never had a second location, and has never once been the cheapest quote in Hillsborough County.
How it started
Hal Ironwake was welding for a fabricator in Tampa when he decided he would rather answer to growers than to a foreman. In 1988 he bought a stick machine, a torch set and the lease on a metal building on Airport Rd, and started fixing whatever the strawberry farms brought him. For the first two years that was mostly tool bars, plows and gate hinges. It stayed mostly that for a while.
What grew the shop was not advertising. It was the fact that Hal would drive out at four in the morning during picking season, and that he would tell a grower when a repair was not going to hold. Both of those habits cost him money in the short run and built the business over thirty years.
Delia takes over
Delia Ironwake-Santos grew up in the shop — sweeping slag, grinding, and eventually welding when her father finally admitted she was better at fit-up than he was. She left, worked as a fabricator elsewhere, and earned her AWS D1.1 structural certification on her own rather than inheriting a title.
She took the shop over in 2016 when Hal’s shoulders gave out. Since then she has added the AWS D1.2 aluminum certification to take on the marine work coming in from the bay, brought the mobile rig up to a proper 24/7 dispatch operation, and hired Ruben Ortiz as the second welder. Five people work here now, and the floor is the same floor.
How we work
We are deliberately small. Five people means Delia or Ruben is on nearly every job, and it means we turn work away rather than take on more than we can weld properly. It also means we will not be the fastest shop to answer email during a busy week, and we would rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise.
The one thing we do not compromise on is honesty about the metal. If a part has been repaired four times and the base metal is now undersized and heat-affected, we will price a replacement instead of selling you a fifth repair. If a boat fitting is corroding because of galvanic action rather than a bad weld, we will explain the cause even though the fix earns us less than a rebuild would.
Certifications
- AWS D1.1 — Structural Welding Code, Steel
- AWS D1.2 — Structural Welding Code, Aluminum
- Certified mobile rig — on-site structural repair
- Work built for third-party CWI inspection
| Founded | 1988, by Hal Ironwake |
|---|---|
| Owner | Delia Ironwake-Santos, since 2016 |
| Second welder | Ruben Ortiz |
| Team | Five people, one location |
| Address | 2140 Airport Rd, Plant City, FL 33563 |
| Rating | 4.8 from 92 reviews |
Who is actually holding the torch
Delia Ironwake-Santos
Owner, AWS D1.1 & D1.2 certified. Second generation. Runs structural jobs, all aluminum and marine work, and most of the after-hours mobile dispatch. Learned fit-up from Hal and certification from a code book.
Ruben Ortiz
Welder & fabricator. Joined in 2018. Handles the bulk of the trailer and equipment repair, runs the shop MIG and flux-core work, and is the reason most trailer jobs turn around inside a week.
Hal Ironwake
Founder, 1988. Retired from the hood but still turns up on Saturdays to inspect other people’s welds and give an opinion nobody asked for. The shop’s standard is still largely his.