Truck & Trailer Fabrication / Machine Shop
Custom truck and trailer fabrication — bumpers, cattle guards, headache racks, brackets and mounts. Talk to a real shop.
What We Build
Bumpers & Cattle Guards
Heavy-duty, built to take a hit.
Headache Racks
Cab guards and rack systems.
Brackets & Mounts
Spare tire mounts, crane plates and more.
Custom Fabrication
Tell us what you need made.
Why Ames Hydraulics
- Talk to a real shop, not a chain
- Custom truck and trailer fabrication
- Bumpers, cattle guards, racks, brackets & mounts
- Serving the Ames area
Tell Us What You Need Built
Tell us what’s going on and we’ll get right back to you.
Ames Hydraulics — 210 Freel Dr, Ames, IA 50010 · we serve trucks, trailers & equipment across central Iowa.
Related: Engine Rebuild Shop — Pre-Electronic Diesels & Carbureted Gas Engines
What Comes Off the Machines Here
- Shafts — turned, threaded, keyed, and splined; worn journals built up and machined back to size
- Bushings and bearings seats — bores restored, custom bushings made from bronze, steel, or nylon
- Spindles — trailer, wagon, and equipment spindles turned or replaced
- Hydraulic components — glands, pistons, rod ends, and clevises for the cylinder benches next door
- Thread repair — stripped holes drilled, tapped, and inserted; broken bolts extracted
- Hubs and couplers — bored, keyed, and fitted
- One-off parts — measured from the broken original when no drawing ever existed
Common Machine Shop Questions
Do I need a drawing? No — most repair machining is measured from the worn or broken part, and we take those measurements here. Can you fix it same-week? Usually; repair machining runs on breakdown time, not production lead time, and harvest emergencies jump the queue. What does one-off machining cost? Most single parts land $75–$400 depending on size and setup — quoted before the chips fly. Do you machine engine blocks and heads? Precision engine machining routes through our trusted partner shops as part of an engine rebuild — one point of contact, honest scope. Bring the part to 210 Freel Dr or text photos to 515-292-2599.
A Repair Machine Shop, Not a Production House
People searching for a machine shop near me are usually looking for one of two different businesses, and it pays to know which one this is. Production machine shops and CNC machine shops run parts by the hundred to a print — a fine business, and not ours. This is a repair machine shop: one part, no print, often no manufacturer left to call. The spindle that needs turning back to round, the bore that needs bushing, the shaft nobody sells, the obsolete casting that needs a thread repaired — measured off the worn original and machined to put a working machine back to work. If you need five hundred widgets, we’ll point you to the production houses that do that well. If you need the one part that’s stopping your equipment, made or mended this week, that’s exactly what this floor is for.
Machining Plus Everything Around It
What makes a repair machine shop useful isn’t the lathe — it’s the lathe next to the welding floor, the hydraulic benches, and the engine rebuild bench. Worn shafts get built up by the welder and turned back to dimension by the machinist in the same building. Cylinder glands get made for cylinders being rebuilt twenty feet away. Broken bolts drilled out, threads repaired with inserts, keyways cut, hubs bored, bushings pressed — the whole vocabulary of making old equipment serviceable, with nothing shipped anywhere and no finger-pointing between vendors. One building, one invoice, one place to call when central Iowa’s iron needs a part that doesn’t exist anymore.
What Our Machine Shop Does
When people search for a machine shop near me around Ames they usually need one of a handful of things, and this is a repair-driven machine shop built for exactly those:
- Line boring & bore welding — worn pivot pins and bushing bores on buckets, booms, loaders, and cylinders bored true and built back to size
- Shaft & keyway work — turning, keyways, splines, and threads on shafts for pumps, gearboxes, and drivelines
- Bushings, pins & sleeves — made to fit when the part is backordered or no longer sold
- Cylinder machining — honing, rod repair, and gland work behind our hydraulic cylinder rebuild service
- Hard-facing & build-up — worn surfaces welded up and machined back to spec
- One-off & obsolete parts — the piece you can’t buy anymore, made from the sample or the print
A Repair Machine Shop, Not a Production House
Most shops that come up for machine shop near me are either automotive engine shops or high-volume production houses that want long part runs. This is neither — it’s a repair machine shop attached to a full hydraulic, welding, and equipment operation, which means we make the one part that gets a machine running again, not a thousand parts on a contract. That’s why farmers, contractors, and other shops bring us the broken shaft, the egged-out bore, and the obsolete casting: we can machine it, weld it, and put it back to work the same week. Deep block-and-head machining we outsource to partner shops with a single point of contact, so you still deal with one shop from teardown to running.