- May 27, 2026
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Through his eight years serving in the U.S. Navy, Winter Garden’s AJ Burnett always dreamed of home.
No matter where he was in the world — Afghanistan, Iraq, southeast Asia — he always thought of home.
“I spent eight years being homesick because Winter Garden is where my family’s been for a long, long time, so it was always home to me,” Burnett said. “I always had every intention of coming back home, whether I took over Florida Metal Craft or not, I always had every intention of moving back home and being able to stay in the Winter Garden area.”
For eight years after graduating from West Orange High School, Burnett served in the Navy, specializing in human intelligence and counterintelligence before returning home to Winter Garden and being the fourth generation of his family to run the family business, Florida Metal Craft.
Despite growing up spending time in Florida Metal Craft, Burnett said he never had the desire to join the family business his great-grandfather started in 1931.
Upon graduation in 2012, he enlisted in the Navy, fulfilling the call to service he felt since he was a child. The Navy had the most diverse options available of potential pathways to serve. He was shipped to Intel Basic School at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve always been decent with talking to people, communicating, so the human intel is what I wanted to pursue,” he said.
After at least two years, he was screened to go to Naval Special Warfare, which led him to participating in special operations for the Navy and supporting the West Coast SEAL teams.
His deployments sent him to the Middle East and southeast Asia, but he always missed home. Amazingly, he managed to stumble across ways to reconnect to home.
“It was funny that I’d be in weird corners of the world — Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan — and ran into people from Winter Garden that I either knew from West Orange or through mutual friends,” Burnett said. “No matter where I ended up in the world, it was weird how usually you found somebody that was from Winter Garden or knew about Winter Garden.”
Burnett recalled the first time he ran into someone he knew from his West Orange High days. He was in Kuwait and ran into a fellow Warrior alumnus who joined the Air Force and also happened to be deployed in Kuwait. Burnett said he was headed to the bathroom in the middle of the night when he passed a familiar face. Unsure it was who he thought, Burnett called him by his first name, an anomaly in the military, garnering the man’s attention. Burnett asked about his last name.
“I was like, ‘Dude, it’s AJ. We went to West Orange together,’” he said. “He was like, ‘No way,’ but yet, in the middle of Kuwait in the middle of the night, I woke up for a pee break and found a friend from high school.”
Any moment Burnett was able to reconnect with his alma mater or his hometown was special. It always was refreshing and a “big win” for him.
As his time in the military was winding down, Burnett said it was rewarding to be making an impact on making the world a safer place, but it was time for him to start thinking about what would come next.
He returned to the idea of his family business.
Burnett said it would have been “kind of silly” for him not to take over Florida Metal Craft because of its success throughout 95 years and generations of his family.
Burnett’s parents traveled to California to make the drive back to Florida with their son, with everyone thrilled to have him home for good.
Burnett went right to work at Florida Metal Craft. His dad still was running the show, so he spent time working in the shop to re-acclimate himself to the environment.
As a kid, the times he was in the shop either was to help sweep and mop the floors and clean toilets or to work on a personal project with his friends. He remembered going to job sites with his dad, bringing his little tape measure and being right by his side.
As an adult, he had to learn everything he could from the veteran employees and work alongside his dad in a professional capacity.
It wasn’t long before his dad pulled him into the administrative offices, and the transition to leadership began.
He said it was a tumultuous learning curve, going from the rigorous structure of the military that had clear-cut guidelines of what could and could not be done to everything falling on his shoulders at Florida Metal Craft.
“There was this pressure that came along with carrying on the family legacy and the burning fear of failure of ‘Oh, I don’t want this place to crash and burn on my watch,’” Burnett said.
It was the leadership training conferences, his various activities with student council and involvement in sports at West Orange High that he attributes to his ability to lead and be organized in the military and at Florida Metal Craft. His time at West Orange taught him discipline, team work and leadership.
In early 2023, Burnett officially took ownership of the business in partnership with Matt Bracewell. He said it was a “big, huge honor” to become the next generation of Burnetts to take the reins.
Growing up, Burnett always bragged about his family’s company building the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ pirate ship and the big fronds for the top of the pineapple at Bongos at what was then Downtown Disney.
Now as the owner, Burnett is working on projects with Crooked Can as the brewery expands to Minneola. He also is working with the University of Central Florida on hypersonic technology.
“Having my own projects now has been pretty cool, and I knew that little AJ would have been proud to brag about,” Burnett said.
After 95 years of operating in West Orange, Burnett hopes to continue the longstanding legacy of being the hometown, community-focused shop for the next 100 years.
“We’ve always been the one place somebody can go to, no matter how small the project is, and we’ll get it done,” he said. “We’re kind of the one fabrication shop that still has a walk-in storefront where anybody off the street ... can walk in and be like, ‘Hey, I need this one weird little piece.’ We’ve always been there to do it for them.”
