Before homelabs, before the blog, before any of this — there was King Mechanical Specialty. This is LOG-001 for a reason: it’s the first big public thing Root Labs shipped, and everything since has built on what we learned doing it.
The ask
King Mechanical Specialty is an industrial valve and instrumentation distributor — 60+ years in business, serving power generation, oil & gas, chemical processing, water treatment, pharmaceutical, and food & beverage. They came to us with an old, outdated site that needed a real refresh: something modern, but also something they could keep current — posting close-out inventory and running their own advertising slideshow without calling a developer every time.
The build
No CMS, no framework — hand-built HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS. Light, minimal, and cost-friendly, which mattered as much as anything else here: this wasn’t a project with a framework budget or hosting to match one. The trickiest part is the product line catalog: dozens of manufacturer brands, each needing its own page, consistent styling, and an easy way for King Mech to find what they’re looking for — plus the inventory posting and the rotating advertising banner they specifically asked for, both built so their team can update them directly.
King Mech is still live at kingmech.com. We’re not maintaining it day-to-day anymore, but it’s the reason this log exists at all.