GUILDERLAND — By day, he works at Guilderland’s transfer station, recycling paper and cardboard, glass and metal. In his free time, he runs Aggressive Metal Works, forging super-heated metal into hammers and axes and building scrap-metal monsters, snarling dragons, and Star Wars spacecraft.

Michael Cataldo, 35, whose metal shop is in a four-bay garage at his Central Bridge home, says that, when he was thinking about a name for his company, he did an online search for the phrase “metal art.”

“Everything,” he says hyperbolically, “that came up was little-old-lady stuff.” He knew he could make stuff “way cooler than that, that guys would think is cool.” Things, he said, involving spikes, barbed wire, and chains. And his taste in music tends toward “loud, screaming” heavy metal.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m listening to some aggressive metal,” Cataldo says. “And most of my sculptures are more evil and aggressive.” So the name suggested itself naturally.

As a student, he liked art class and especially a ceramics class in high school, where he could create things in three dimensions, and “not just on flat paper,” he says. He liked books about survival and wilderness, particularly novels by Gary Paulsen about dog sledding. He loved science-fiction movie series including “Alien,” “Predator,” and “Star Wars.”

Cataldo — the older son of Guilderland Town Clerk Jean Cataldo — slipped gradually into the world of metalworking. At about age 19, he was a maintenance worker for David Fusco, who owned Carman Plaza and several other businesses, and the head maintenance worker there showed him some welding techniques.

Five years in, he had about reached his pay cap at that job, Cataldo said. He thought to himself, “This welding thing is cool,” and he bought a small home welder. He then went to Modern Welding School in Schenectady and graduated with high honors. It was structural welding that he learned there, he said, describing this as “attaching one piece of metal to another.”

A teacher at the school taught him how to make axes and showed him some scrap-metal monsters and other sculptural structures he had made.

This inspired him to buy a small forge. “I was like, ‘Oh, you can heat metal up, and hit it with a hammer? That’s got to be fun!’” he said.

He began taking classes at two different blacksmithing schools making “all kinds of things — knives, axes, monster heads, pattern-welded steel.”

Landscaper friends sometimes bring him their broken shovel heads. Most often, he gets his metal from scrap yards. He is on a first-name basis with owners of several area scrap yards, in Schenectady and Albany, he says.

He also always tries to save all the small bits of scrap metal he produces. He can always find a place to use them, he says. The first forge he built exemplifies this. He calls it “the spider forge,” because of its spider-like legs made of rebar. The body of the forge is embellished with small metallic points Cataldo got from a fabrication shop where he once worked.

“They were cutting these [points] off, and had a bucket of them that they were just going to throw out. I offered to pay scrap money, but they said, ‘Just take them,’” Cataldo said.

He demonstrates forging a point into the tip of a steel rod, first opening up the front and back of the spider forge and heating it to about 3,000 degrees, placing the steel in with a pair of tongs till it glows red.

Holding the tongs parallel to his body for safety, he takes the red-hot rod over to the center of a eight-foot-tall power hammer, which he pedals with his foot to bring down the drop hammer that pounds the end into a rough point as he occasionally turns the steel.

He then reheats the steel — “The working temperature for forging is between 1,400 and 1,700 degrees, and then it starts to get too cool” — before moving it over to an anvil, to hit it with a small sledgehammer and shape it further.

Much of his business involves fabrication — constructing things from existing parts — or repairs, rather than forging, he says.

He occasionally forges, but more often fabricates, custom gates or railings. The fabricating process involves discussing style and other requirements with the customer, taking measurements of all the steps or other existing elements, and sketching a design, before starting to build.

Forging is more labor-intensive and results in a more expensive product, Cataldo says. As an example of the pricing of small forged items, a coat or hat rock about a foot tall, made of mild steel, with two long, straight horns at the top, a hook turned up at the bottom, and a simple scowling face in the middle is priced at $55, which Cataldo says is inexpensive considering that it takes six hours to forge.

The copper and steel flowers he makes by plasma cutting, forging, and riveting are a big seller at the annual Renaissance Fair, he says. Last year, Cataldo says, a guy bought “like six of these, and just handed them out to all the pretty girls at the fair.” The flowers go for $75 each.

He is often asked to repair stair railings that have rotted at the bottom, where they meet the concrete steps, he says. He fixes lawnmowers, trailers, excavation equipment, aluminum dollies, and “lots of random things that people break,” he says, and he also does some automotive repair.

Some clients want practical items to be fanciful and artistic. One gate that Cataldo made, for a deck around a swimming pool, features a dragon made of chains. The dragon’s arms grip either side of the gate, and its mouth stands open, snarling. He made the creature from bicycle chains and chains that came from the Freihofer bakery.

Outside Cataldo’s shop stands an eight-foot-tall metal “centurion” holding a 9-foot spear; the bigger-than-life sculpture is made of materials including milk cans, saw blades, steel rakes, gears, and clutch plates. Cataldo has a second centurion, too. He plans to place one at either end of his driveway.

“The second I have a forklift or a tractor with forks, my monsters are going to get so much bigger,” he said. “Right now I’m maxed out at about 400 pounds.”

That’s one of many plans he has.

The future

Over the next 10 to 15 years, Cataldo hopes to build an entire Star Wars battle and hang it from the 14-foot ceiling above his shop.

On the side nearer the house will be lines of rebel spacecraft — “X-Wings and Y-Wings, all in formation.” On the other side of the 75-by-40-foot shop will be the Evil Empire. “And in the middle’s going to be the battle scene,” Cataldo says, “with starships swooping and colliding.”

Cataldo has a long list of precautions he takes in the shop, including requiring that everyone wear goggles, flame-resistant clothing, and cut-resistant gloves. He also has an exhaust system to remove welding smoke and plasma-cutter exhaust.

Mishaps are rare. But, once, a tiny chip of metal flew off during the process of forging, and entered his right hand, just below his thumb. It’s still in there.

Cataldo was making a tomahawk with his fiancée, punching a hole into a piece of metal, where the handle would fit. He was holding the main piece of metal with one pair of tongs, and holding another piece of metal perpendicular to it with a second pair of tongs. His fiancée was wielding the sledgehammer.

“I was a little off,” he said, of the way that he held the upright piece of metal, and a little chip flew off the edge and cut a slit in his hand. He realized the chip was actually in his hand one day when a rare-earth magnet clung to his hand. He cheerfully demonstrates that now when he visits elementary schools.

“Fourth-graders love it,” he says.

Occasionally he can feel it “poking in there,” but for the most part it doesn’t hurt.

“I would have had this surgically removed, but then I wouldn’t be magnetic any more,” he quips.

Two of the bays in their four-car garage are for Cataldo’s metalworking, and two are automotive bays, where his fiancée, Ashley Shields, works on cars. They bought the home last year and are still setting it up.

His fiancée is a “gearhead,” Cataldo said, who has built cars with rocket-fuel engines.

They already had mutual friends when he noticed one day on Facebook, about four years ago, that she was moving, and he offered to bring her some cardboard boxes.

He brought them over, and they talked for a while. He remembers thinking, “Wow!” of the woman who works on cars in her spare time.

They hung out a few times, he said, and then he thought, “I better make a move, before I get locked into the friend zone.” So, as he was leaving her home one day, he summoned up his nerve and “planted a kiss on her,” he recalls. “And she kissed me back.”

Nevertheless, he ran out of there, he said, nervous that he might have misread the situation.

She immediately texted him and asked, “Did you just kiss me and then run away?” He texted back, yes. And that was the start.

She has two children from a previous relationship, a boy who is 7, and a girl who is 13. A video of the couple and her son, Caden, team-striking a metal piece that would become the head of a forging hammer for the boy has been viewed 8,900 times on Aggressive Metalworks’s Facebook page.

Cataldo and Shields are also expecting a child, in October.