Mike Wagner of Cornfield Customs Ltd. has made a name for himself with masterpieces on wheels. He’s a metal shaping star on social media. But the craft is its own reward for this self-described introvert. “I like to work, but the only time I really feel free is when I’m shaping metal,” he says. “I don’t care if anybody else likes what I do, but for me as a person and my own sanity, it’s what I’m on this planet to do.” 

With keen insight and experience, Wagner turns complex projects into a logical series of tasks. “Metal shaping to me just makes sense, because I can physically touch the problem and I break everything down into five basic steps: you can shrink it, stretch it, cut it, bend it, weld it. That is it,” Wagner explains. “With my lack of education and formal training, if you break it down to those simple steps, it’s not that complicated. You just have to arrange everything in a certain process to get from A to B.”

Wagner got into automotive metal shaping because he wanted to build himself a Model A. His talent and promise quickly impressed a seasoned hot rod fabricator. “I knew nothing about hot rods,” he recalls. “I went to vocational school for welding and machining. I knew how to do basic machining processes, and I met this old guy who’d been building hot rods since the 50s then he’s like, ‘Man, you’re pretty good at this. You should quit your job.’ And that’s exactly what I did. So, at 20 years old, I quit my production TIG welding job and just opened up a shop.”

Wagner’s over 15-year relationship with Baileigh Industrial has influenced his trajectory in the field as well: “Once I started getting equipment through Baileigh, it kind of opened my eyes to a lot of stuff.”

Baileigh’s machines brought the sought-after strength and performance of legacy power hammers within reach of a wider range of creators. “When I got into metal shaping… 20 years ago you had to find a Pettingell or a Yoder buried in the pigsty on a farm and dig it out and completely re-engineer and rebuild it yourself. The fact that I could look in a catalog and I could call Baileigh and say, ‘Hey, I need this hammer and I need this tooling with it for this job I need to do’… it really helped me out. I think it really… changed the path of my career.”

After rigorously training with simpler tools, Wagner came to appreciate how machinery like Baileigh power hammers can save time and effort. “I’ve gone from doing things the hard way—which I think makes people a better craftsman—to understanding how valuable efficiency and quality is. Yeah, I could make a quarter panel with a hammer and dolly and a tucking fork and it might take three weeks to get to the same way I could produce it with a power hammer in three days,” Wagner explains. “The machinery can be very expensive but the efficiency over time is where that comes into play.”

Wagner is known for quality results in many facets of the custom automotive community. “Some people will tell you I’m known for metal shaping. Some people will say tube chassis. Some other guys will say traditional hot rod chassis,” he says. “In the beginning, it was traditional hot rod stuff. I kind of evolved into making door skins and quarters for those, which then led to more exotic stuff, like aluminum bodied race cars and exotic European stuff.”

One high-profile project that Wagner mentions is a 1961 Aston Martin DB4 Zagato tourer from a few years back. “That kind of got a lot of attention because the whole car was polished to a mirror.”