Nick Bechtoldt — Co-Founder, Fabrication & Operations
Nick Bechtoldt is a co-founder of Pi Fabricators, where he leads fabrication and product development — including the company’s hard-facing and engineered-wear work. He brings hands-on expertise in metal fabrication, hard-facing application (spray-and-fuse and drop-carbide MIG, both manual and CNC), and the wear-component development that keeps heavy industrial equipment running.
Nick holds a B.S. in Renewable Materials from Oregon State University’s College of Forestry (Wood Science & Engineering) — a background that maps directly to Pi Fabricators’ wood products and recycling customers. Before co-founding the company in 2019, he was Planer Facility Manager at Columbia Vista Corporation, where he ran operations and maintenance for a planer mill and dry kilns and a team of roughly 30, coordinating across the sawmill, shipping, sales, and production planning. Earlier, he managed alternative-fuel research trials at OSU’s Hermiston Agricultural Research and Extension Center.
His fabrication toolkit spans MIG and stick welding, plasma and oxyacetylene cutting, milling, lathing, surface grinding, and CNC G-code programming. Nick is an Eagle Scout, and outside the shop he’s a mountain biker, inventor, and builder.