A shop in Cokato, Minnesota is putting up large automated manufacturing equipment and needs two machine builders to build and debug it. The contract asks for both halves of the trade from the same person: bearing installs, gantry installs, leveling and dowel pinning on the mechanical side, and panel wiring, schematic reading, machine plumbing and electrical debug on the other. It pays $48 an hour straight time, $62 overtime, $76 on Sundays and holidays, $28 for travel time, plus $225 a day per diem with no receipts required. It starts on September 14, 2026, runs about two months with the potential to go long term, and it is a day shift of ten hours, six days a week.
Two trades, one pair of hands
There is a division in machine building that exists on paper far more cleanly than it exists on a shop floor. On paper there is a mechanical assembler who sets bearings, squares gantries, levels a base and pins it true, and there is an electrician who pulls the loom, lands the terminals, reads the schematic and finds the fault. In a room where a machine is going up on a deadline, those two people are frequently the same person, and everybody in the building knows which one it is.
What is unusual about this contract is that it says so out loud. The scope names the mechanical work and the electrical work in the same breath and asks for one person who does both, twice over. That is a narrower ask than it looks — and for the professionals who fit it, it is the rare posting that does not quietly pay for half of what they know.
Build and debug is one job, not two phases
The other thing worth reading twice in this scope is the word debug. Plenty of build contracts end when the last bolt is torqued and somebody else arrives to find out why axis three faults on the return stroke. This one keeps the same hands on it through commissioning, which changes the nature of the work: the person who set the mechanical stack is the person reading the drive fault, and a great deal of guesswork disappears when those are not two different people with two different theories.
It also changes what the professional takes away. A build you only assembled teaches you the print. A build you assembled and then debugged teaches you what your own tolerances did to the machine three weeks later — and that is the knowledge that separates a builder who can make a line run from one who can make it run right for years.
Why the work is in a town of three thousand
Cokato sits about an hour west of Minneapolis, with a population under three thousand. That is not an aside; it is most of the story of American machine building. The equipment that makes things tends to get built in small shops in small towns, by companies whose names are not on the finished product, and the professionals who staff those builds have historically found out about them by word of mouth or not at all.
Minnesota's manufacturing base is deep and unusually diversified, and the technical education that feeds it is genuinely local — Ridgewater College, twenty minutes west of Cokato, is one of the community colleges that trains the mechanical and electrical technicians this kind of shop hires. The Minnesota Precision Manufacturing Association represents a great many of the shops in the same corridor. The work is there. Seeing it has been the hard part.
What the schedule and the per diem actually mean
Ten hours a day, six days a week, day shift. It is a real schedule and it is stated plainly on the posting rather than discovered afterwards. Straight time is $48, overtime $62, and Sunday and holiday work $76. Travel time is paid at $28 an hour, which is a line most postings in this trade leave off entirely.
The per diem is $225 a day and does not require receipts. That last clause is worth more than it looks to anyone who has spent a Sunday evening flattening restaurant receipts onto a scanner bed to reclaim money they had already spent. For a two-month contract it is the difference between an expense process and simply being paid for being away from home.
Where the credentials come from, if you are building toward this
There is no single certificate that says "machine builder", which is precisely why the people who can do both halves are scarce. The credentialing that does travel well in this work comes from NIMS on the metalworking and precision side, and the machinery industry's own workforce programs through PMMI, whose members are the machine builders themselves. For keeping current on what the equipment is doing rather than what the credential says, Automation World remains the industry's most useful weekly read.
How this contract came to be public at all
Automate America is a marketplace for skilled professionals, and it is free to post, free to apply and free to hire. A customer posts the work at the rate they are willing to pay, that rate is public before anyone asks, and nobody bids anybody down to win it. Trusted professionals with ratings, reviews and finished contracts behind them apply directly, usually within minutes of the posting going live.
For a shop, that is a different mechanic from a requisition. You can hire an assembler, and you can hire an electrician, but the person who is both is generally already on somebody else's build — and a two-week search does not conjure them. Posting the work puts it in front of the people who are between builds today, at your number, at no cost to you at all.
For a service company, there is a second use. If you have builders coming free in a fortnight, you can apply your own employees to a contract like this one. They stay on your payroll, the quiet stretch on your schedule stops costing you money, and they come back having built and debugged somebody else's equipment.
What two months of this is worth afterwards
Short contracts get judged on their rate and almost never on what they leave behind, which is a mistake professionals in this trade tend to make exactly once. A two-month equipment build is a compact, self-contained thing you can describe in a sentence at the start of the next conversation: a machine that did not exist, that you assembled, wired and debugged, that is now making parts. That is a materially different claim from two months of coverage on somebody else's line.
It also compounds in a specific direction. Every builder accumulates a private catalogue of the ways a machine can be wrong — the nest that locates fine cold and binds warm, the loom that passes continuity and fails under vibration, the level that reads true on a floor that moves. You only collect those by being present when the thing runs, and a contract that keeps you through debug is a contract that pays you to collect them. Ten years of that is the difference between a builder who follows a print and a builder a shop calls back by name.
If you run a service company, the arithmetic is different
For a shop with people on the payroll, the number that hurts is never the rate on a contract — it is the week where a qualified builder is on the clock with nothing to bill against. That week costs the same as a busy one and produces nothing, and it is the single least discussed line in the whole industry because it does not appear on any invoice.
Applying your own available employees to a contract like this one is the cheapest possible answer to it. They remain your employees, on your payroll, under your insurance. They spend two months on somebody else's equipment build, come back with an industry and a machine your own customer base does not have, and the quiet stretch in your schedule stops being a loss. You did not have to win the job, quote it, or carry the customer relationship — the work was already posted and the people were already yours.
That is the labour market this marketplace actually opens: not just independents between contracts, but the available bench inside service companies that no job board can see, because those professionals are not looking for a job. They already have one.
The contract, in one place
Machine Builder — electrical and mechanical, two people needed. Cokato, Minnesota. Build and debug new automated manufacturing equipment. Mechanical: bearing installs, gantry installs, leveling, dowel pinning. Electrical: panel wiring, schematic reading, machine wiring, machine plumbing, electrical debug. Starting September 14, 2026 for approximately two months with the potential for long term. Day shift, ten hours a day, six days a week. $48/hr straight time, $62/hr overtime, $76/hr Sunday and holiday, $28/hr travel time, plus $225 a day per diem with no receipts required.
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Tony Wallace, Co-Founder · Automate America · Text first 586-770-8083 · TonyW@AutomateAmerica.com
