The toolholder is the hardware piece in machining that holds the cutting tool so the machine tool spindle can hold them both. In a shrink fit toolholder, thermal contraction rather than mechanical clamping does the holding of the tool. That is, the shrink fit toolholder sleeve is heated so it expands and its bore opens up, allowing the shank of the tool to be inserted, at which point the cooling toolholder contracts and clamps the tool tightly. This expansion and contraction is highly repeatable, allowing the tool be held both rigidly and with tight concentricity.

Shrink fit toolholding works so well, and with such ease (once the operator gets used to simple safety precautions such as wearing gloves) and with relatively low cost, that shrink fit became commonplace in many machining facilities not long after its introduction. In some machine shops, shrink fit became the way cutting tools are held, used for every tool except those with an unusual size or application requiring some different toolholder choice.

But now, the place of shrink fit toolholding might have evolved again. I see this in Advance CNC Machining, a machining provider in Grove City, Ohio, focused on four- and five-axis machining center work. In the past, Advance CNC used shrink fit toolholding more routinely. Two factors have changed this. One is the improvement in collet toolholders, the chief mechanical clamping alternative. The higher-end collet toolholders have improved to the point that their concentricity in clamping tools rivals that of shrink fit. But perhaps the more significant development is the change in the nature of machining. For Advance CNC, and for other machine shops, a steadily increasing share of machining involves high-spindle-speed milling at low depths of cut, rather than slow hogging at heavy engagement. The faster cutting increases the chance vibration might be an impediment to effective cutting. The rigidity of the shrink fit connection is a drawback in some of these cases, because the collet flexure and weight distribution of the collet toolholder together provide for a damping effect often useful at higher spindle speeds.

Advance CNC is still a routine user of shrink fit toolholding, but the application is focused now. The uses of shrink fit include high-force milling applications, small-diameter tools, and long-reach applications taking advantage of shrink fit’s slender profile.

I talk more about all of this in this video filmed in Advance CNC’s toolroom. A demo of shrink fit can be seen in the video as well:

Advance CNC Machining website

Subscribe now

Share

In Walnut Grove, Missouri, I found a story of vertical insourcing by a small manufacturer that seemed to capture in miniature the value of domestic manufacturing in the United States.

David Gott designs aftermarket auto parts supplied by his company, DNJ Components. And he believed he could develop a replacement valve body for a GM 10-speed Allison transmission that is superior to the original component.

However, to call this a complex part is a crazy understatement. The photo above provides a sense of the geometric detail. Narrow tolerances throughout the part ensure the tight sealing necessary for effective operation within the transmission assembly.

Development involved a lot of failure. A lot of trial and error. Total development time spanned 18 months. And at one point, it was necessary to create slightly different versions of the part 37 times within 17 days.

And this is the aspect of the development work that could not have been done without in-house machining, a capability DNJ Components at one time did not have. Gott formerly relied on suppliers, independent machine shops, to make his parts. The good shops were busy, generally requiring DNJ Components to wait its turn. When the company brought machining capability in-house, this move amplified the ability to innovate. A part as complex as the valve body would never have been conceivable if every version had to be sent out, if every iteration required days or weeks of waiting.

Gott talks to me about all of this, including the story of the incredible a-ha moment of finally getting the last precison feature engineered and machined correctly on the valve body, in the latest episode of The Z Axis.

I mentioned the United States. The phenomenon Gott experienced unarguably also occurs at scale. Because ideas eventually have to be made real, and because valuable engineering ideas generally entail precision or complexity, manufacturing capability is a vital enabler to innovation. Manufacturing and innovation go together. Just as a small inventor is limited in his ability to innovate if another source does the physical creation, a nation is limited in how far it can innovate if it hits the limits of its available capacity to produce. One of the immeasurable values of having manufacturing close is the ease of iteration that enables and leads to better ideas.

Watch the episode here that explores all of this:

Today, DNJ Components runs four CNC machining centers from Haas Automation, mostly for recurring part production to stock inventory and fill orders, but also for iteration as needed as Gott continues to develop product. He knows transmissions but did not come to this work knowing machining. Distributor Phillips Commercial gave him valuable help in learning how to program, set up and run machining centers. Thank you to Philips for making the introduction to David Gott.

Phillips Commercial

Subscribe now

Share

Is 5-axis machining better than 4-axis machining? Not always.

The definition of “5-axis” is generally well understood within machining. This is a mode of machining drawing on two pivoting axes of either the table or the tool to bring even greater motion and orientation capabilities in tandem with the XYZ linear motion.

“4-axis” is a way of referring to the standard horizontal machining center platform, which offers a rotary axis under the table capable of rotating the work.

The latter option might seem to offer less freedom, except that it offers freedom of a different sort. Compared to a 5-axis machine, the 4-axis platform likely affords more room to hold more parts per setup.

Further, the difference between the two capabilities may relate to only one odd feature of a workpiece that really needs the 5-axis orientation. An engineered fixture capable of holding the part (or every part in the setup) at just the right angle can allow the cycle on the 4-axis machine to machine this odd feature as well. The question is then whether the quantity and value of the job can justify the investment in engineered fixturing.

Advance CNC Machining has 5-axis and 4-axis machining centers from Makino, and the shop’s Kyle Dunaway thinks about which jobs go on which machines. He shares his thinking with me in this video, which also includes machining cycle footage demonstrating both types of machine motion:

Advance CNC Machining website

Subscribe now

Share

Lifestyle Additive Manufacturing got bad news soon after the company was founded. The specialist in selective laser sintering (SLS) additive manufacturing expected to begin with two major opportunities for SLS work, using these as the opportunity for beginning and growing. Then, unexpectedly and for different reasons in each case, the two opportunities failed to materialize.

Co-founder and technical director Nate Stevens was left with SLS machine capacity and time on his hands. He used this to explore the SLS process, to push it: to learn what he could through one trial-and-error SLS build after another to find the points of failure and identify how near he could come to these points in search of greater precision, speed or part density within the build. As a result of this exploration, he was ready when the challenging jobs from customers began to come.

Stevens is one of the most knowledgeable people I know in terms of SLS part design, build design and process engineering. As he makes clear in the latest episode of The Z Axis, in which he shares the story of Lifestyle Additive’s journey so far, he undertook to launch the business at a point when he understood 3D printing but still had little practical knowledge of this process. His accelerated expertise is almost entirely the result of the unexpected interlude resulting from the planned work that did not materialize.

Watch this episode on the startup manufacturer’s journey:

Stevens, as I say, is one of the most knowledgeable people I know on applying SLS for polymer part production. He and I recorded a series of videos in which I tried to draw out some of this knowledge. That series is The SLS Mindset. Here are links to all of the episodes:

The SLS Mindset

Subscribe now

Share

As automation becomes a more expected part of CNC machining processes, it is more commonly provided as an integrated component of the machine tool rather than an add-on. That is, as automation is more baked-in, it becomes more built-in.

Peyton Hamilton of Advance CNC Machining describes why. Machine shops that have learned to automate also learn there is more speed to be won.

Placing the automation system including the pallet storage and pallet changer all inside of the sheet metal of the machine has the effect of moving all of this as close as possible to the machining workzone. The integration speeds job-to-job changeover and also simplifies one operator’s ability to control and manage a long sequence of jobs.

Advance CNC’s two Makino DA300P machining centers each integrate 40 pallets within the machines. The machines are seen at the start of this post. The photo immediately above shows the workchanger grabbing a part to carry into the machine’s workzone.

Peyton, who oversees them, actually learned setup and CNC program management on these machines. To learn machining on this equipment is not the typical machinist experience. He says this was like learning to drive in a Ferrari.

I spoke with him to understand how to think about machine tools that are essentially like self-contained machine shops, given the variety of jobs they are at any moment tooled and ready to run. Another area of efficiency he experiences is in the ease of continuing production during quality-related delays such as first-article inspection. The current job can be paused and another job can be loaded, even if just to run a few more pieces of a 100-piece run, while the current job is waiting for validation.

Here is my conversation with Peyton Hamilton about machining centers with built-in pallet automation:

Subscribe now

Share

For manufacturers, should automation engineering, installation and integration be an in-house competency?

There is very good reason to answer no. A manufacturing organization and its team members know how to produce; they do not necessarily know how to install and optimize capital equipment. Therefore, leave integration to the integrators—the companies that can come to the shop and get a new automated system set up quickly and running perfectly.

But the potential limitation to this approach comes 18-24 months later. What happens when the part family made on that automated system is discontinued or substantially changed?

At Galley Support Innovations (GSI), the rotary-axis accessory installed on a vertical machining center to run a particular part lost this role when that part was transitioned to horizontal machining centers. The automation accessory (seen at the top of the page) then was removed from the shop and went to a shelf.

GSI manufacturers hardware for aircraft interiors such as a cabinet handles and latches. I visited the shop to speak with CNC manager and programmer Drew Howanietz (above), who shared the next chapter in the story.

That next chapter demonstrates the value and power of having automation expertise on the team, even to the point of developing that knowledge in DIY fashion. Howanietz spoke with me for The Z Axis.

The rotary-axis accessory was discovered waiting on that shelf. Howanietz and another employee found themselves in the deep reaches of GSI’s stored tooling and hardware. The other employee was newer to GSI. He recognized the accessory for what it was and asked, “Why are we not using this?”

Good question!

A little consideration made clear this asset had usefulness beyond the part family for which it had been purchased. Through resources including YouTube videos, Howanietz began to discover and teach himself not just how to install the rotary axis on an existing vertical machining center, but more critically, how to create machining programs making use of it.

Hand-in-hand with this developing expertise came developing insight about where the capability might go, and what it might do.

Machining of various part numbers was made more automated through the use of this accessory. What had been multiple setups on multiple machines was consolidated into a machining cycle in which the rotary axis alone does the work of reorienting the part for machining features at different angles. This is the accessory’s role.

And this capability is a foundation, Howanietz realized. GSI is expanding, in need of more capacity, and challenged to find more skilled machining employees to add to its team. The new (or rediscovered) automation capability provided the beginning of an answer. Pairing a robot to the machining center equipped with the extra axis would make an automated machining system capable of running substantial production during nighttime hours with no employees present.

This insight, and this development path for automation, might not have been GSI’s direction if not for the hands-on exploration of automation by the shop’s own team.

Watch the episode:

Subscribe now

Share

Obtaining AS9100, the manufacturing procedures and quality certification serving as a validator within the aerospace industry, might seem like simply a matter of defining processes and then getting independently certified. There is more than this.

Cassandra Metell (above left), who helped lead the AS9100 certification effort for Advance CNC Machining in Ohio, says there are human and cultural factors as well, and the shop committing to this journey cannot help but be changed by it.

Even in a successful, high-capability machine shop, achieving AS9100 involves:

1. The shift away from trust in tribal knowledge to conforming to documented procedures.

2. Leadership clearly communicating the “why” so that all team members make the shift decribed in point 1.

   

3. Documentation (or way more documentation than in the past) as a new process consideration, bringing important questions about how to automate information capture.

4. “Disciplined thought and discplined action,” in Metell’s words.

5. An opportunity: The chance to fast-track process improvements the shop has long considered but never acted upon. This is an opportunity perhaps never to be repeated.

Metell discusses with me how Advance CNC experienced all of these points and others. Watch our conversation about AS9100 certification for a CNC machine shop:

Subscribe now

Share

The video below describes an example. The impeller is for an undersea pump used in an oil and gas installation. This version made through additive manufacturing with Cold Metal Fusion replaces a previous component made through casting. The new part is titanium while the earlier part was steel. The 3D printed part is therefore lighter, reducing the energy needed to spin this part to run the pump, and also longer-lasting. The titanium part extends the interval between impeller replacements, a big benefit for a part operating underwater.

This part was produced by CADMore Metal on its SLS machines. I posted an episode of Manufacturing Unlimited about Cold Metal Fusion and CADMore Metal’s application of this process. Watch that episode. Here is the bonus follow-up to that episode looking at the impeller part:

Subscribe now

Share

A lot!

3D printer filament maker Push Plastic has more extrusion lines than employees. That leaves every production employee playing a valuable role.

The process runs perfectly when things are perfect. It is the employee’s job to be attentive and curious, to spot when some new imperfect development has crept in.

Joshua Van Vleet is plant manager. He says the number-one employee qualification this role points to is the need to slow down.

Seems easy?

Relatively few can do it, he says. Other production environments encourage people to do the opposite. The 90-day test of new employees at Push Plastic is whether they can slow down in their attention to the process, and many do not make it.

He has much more to say about this in the latest episode of The Z Axis. This episode is a must-watch for manufacturing leaders thinking about the challenge of how to staff for increasingly lightly staffed processes:

This is our second episode with Push Plastic. Check out our earlier episode that looks more broadly at how the company successfully competes as a U.S. manufacturer of a product that is (seemingly) a commodity, and largely produced overseas.

The Z Axis is sponsored by Workforce Factor, a customizable onboarding system for industrial employees. Among other things, it provides a way to bring new hires up to speed on values such as, well, lack of speed. Learn more at the link below.

Workforce Factor

Subscribe now

Share

Robots applied to manufacturing allow for a different approach to architectural forms that brings new options in materials for construction.

Branch Technology in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is the company playing out this sequence. The company uses a fleet of robots to produce structures such as building facades that would otherwise be made by hand by construction workers on a job site.

The robots do 3D printing, but there is more than this. Rigid structures are made via 3D printing in one material, foam infilling with another material, and precision milling of the entire form. Robots do all of this (the mlling is seen above).

The 3D printing is unusual. Branch’s patented approach to 3D printing does not involve extruding material to stack layers, but instead involves pulling material strands like taffy and joining them to form lattices. The resulting rigid lattice forms fill only 7% of the volume with material. (The remaining 93% gets the foam infill that is then milled.)

The next step: Branch Technology is bringing more sustainable options in materials to its architecture and construction customers. Ileri Giwa (above left) is one of the company’s researchers succeeding with bio-based polymers as a replacement for using petroleum-based polymers in the lattice form.

Only the starting point of applying robotic manufacturing in a factory, in place of onsite construction, makes this shift in building materials conceivable.

I visited Branch Technology to learn about all of this for an episode of Manufacturing Unlimited. Giwa will present on his research at the International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (ICAM), the sponsor of the show.

Watch our new episode here, which includes our conversation as well as footage of the robotic operations including foam infilling, milling and the lattice 3D printing:

Subscribe now

Share

Enclosures are the underappreciated CNC machined components for aerospace and defense. When those of us in manufacturing think of the machined parts most characteristic of aircraft, we might think of contoured structural components or engine components made of high-temperature alloys. Enclosures are the sophisticated rugged housings protecting electronics, generally machined from aluminum, and they are becoming all the more important with the rise of more capable aerial weapon and reconnaissance systems that fly unmanned.

Advance CNC Machining, which focuses on precision four- and five-axis machining center work, has become an enclosure expert. For various customers (not all in aerospace, some in marine applications), Advance CNC has produced more than 100 enclosure part numbers. What these lightweight precision parts have in common are critical sealing requirements; cooling details ensuring the temperature stability of the electronics within; and elaborate geometry conforming to the electronics assemblies.

From a distance the enclosure may look like a metal box. It is that, albeit a metal box with a lot of critical machined detail.

I filmed this video at Advance CNC to capture some of what I have learned about these parts. Here are some of the machining challenges and considerations of producing aerial system electronics enclosures:

Subscribe now

Share

The purpose of quality standards is productivity.

That statement seems false. The purpose of quality standards ought to be quality, and holding everyone to the same high level. Standards should be about excellence.

But no. In a capable manufacturing culture staffed by talented, skilled, conscientious team members, everyone is excellent. Or, at least, everyone wants this and aims for it.

The problem is that excellence is subjective. Meanwhile, cost, time, and customer acceptance are the measurable factors by which success is defined. The impulse toward excellence has to be translated into the realm of measurable deliverables, and this is what quality standards do.

The peril of absent quality standards is not poor quality. The peril of absent quality standards is, in a way, too much quality—meaning a process slowed down by misunderstanding and argument among well-intentioned people who see quality in different ways.

I encountered a great story of this. Allied Cycle Works had an inefficient process when its bike painting aimed for individual excellence.

Painting is perhaps the ultimate subjective manufacturing operation. As Allied director of product Sam Pickman explained to me in our conversation, every paint job is imperfect. There is a vast terrain for difference in what level of imperfection to accept.

What defines a great paint job? Everyone has a point of view.

However, once Allied learned how to define paint quality according to an objective standard, arguments ended and productivity rose.

Pickman (above right) describes how the Allied team members created this objective standard for paint. The useful, measurable metric the team found is time spent painting, which differs for bike surfaces with different levels of visibility.

Meanwhile, Pickman also speaks to the larger question: How does a team define standards and get everyone to follow them? This question applies to every organization trying to work faster and more predictably by getting everyone on the same page. Pickman involved every painting stakeholder in the conversation not because of a spirit of inclusion, but because he needed everyone to understand how the quality standard was reached and what its metrics mean.

My conversation with Pickman about how to define and implement a quality standard is the topic of the latest episode of The Z Axis. Watch it here:

This is our second episode with Allied. Check out our ealier episode all about this bike maker’s experience with U.S. manufacturing, and finding the right part of the bike to make in America.

The Z Axis is sponsored by Workforce Factor, a customizable onboarding system for industrial employees. Among other things, it provides a way to quickly bring new hires up to speed on the special, internal quality standards unique to a particular company. Learn more at the link below.

Workforce Factor

Subscribe now

Share

But imagine CT scanning as a daily industrial metrology tool validating ongoing production. Such a tool would do more for measurement than a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) can do. CT scanning can deliver fine-detail measurement of the exterior geometry of the part, like a CMM, but then also adds fine measurement of any detail hidden inside.

Speed has been the limitation on this scenario. CT scanning moves too slowly to keep up with production. Except: Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility have succeeded at making CT scanning faster.

As you might have expected, AI is the key. Part of why CT scanning is slow is the amount of sampling needed. Measuring many different angular sections provides enough data to overcome inherent noise. But in place of all this redundant measurement, deep learning via the Oak Ridge technology, called Simurgh, can now deduce accurate measurements past the noise with far less data.

Parameter development in additive manufacturing was the first beneficiary. Part of what makes AM parameter sets effective is their ability to print fully dense metal without internal pores. Using Simurgh, an array of laser powder bed fusion test specimens in a new metal, all made with different parameters, can be CT scanned rapidly to now determine in a relatively short lead time which parameter set is best.

But scale production, whether additive parts, machined parts, or castings, is the application where fast CT might deliver even greater value.

In the latest episode of Manufacturing Unlimited, I talk with ORNL MDF researcher Obaid Rahman about the promise of fast CT and whether we might see CT scanning begin to fill in for CMMs.

Watch the episode:

Manufacturing Unlimited is produced by ASTM International and sponsored by the International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (ICAM), where Rahman will present on this technology. Learn more at the button below.

ICAM 2026

Subscribe now

Share

For the final installment in the series of videos I have been filming with Nate Stevens of Lifestyle Additive, we talk about applying selective laser sintering (SLS) additive manufacturing for production. SLS is the AM process that inherently wants to do production, for reasons Nate lays out in the video. They relate to the special characteristics of SLS materials (comparable to polymers already used in established production processes) and the lack of support structures allowing for large quantities per build through 3D nesting.

But the cost is not in the printing. Not all of it, that is, and not even most of it. When it comes to production, the way to understand additive manufacturing is not that it is contained entirely in the 3D printer, but that it consists of all the operations in the sequence following it as well. A streamlined, unattended 3D printing cycle could be followed by a time- and labor-intensive set of steps for powder removal, surface finishing or even inspection. To design a part for production SLS is therefore to design it to speed through the steps that follow SLS, and this video considers what that means.

Example: Adding a hole to the design of one part simply to let it hang from a hook sped the part’s setup time for vapor smoothing. Engineering designers involved in large-quantity production immediately recognize the power and importance of design tweaks such as this. SLS is the AM process capable of such large quantities that the “seconds matter” mindset of production enters into succeeding with this process as well.

Watch the video:

Subscribe now

Share

Lifestyle Additive website

Human choices have magnified impact when automated or streamlined systems account for more.

Plus, organizational culture plays a larger role than ever in how manufacturing continues to advance.

The latest episode of The Z Axis considers an example. I talk with Patrick Curry, one of the family owners of Fullerton Tool, a maker of cutting tools for CNC machining, about the way the company’s V-Mac end mill was developed. Culture and human choice were paramount in the tool that actually came to market. From this example, consider how human factors are paramount in all the manufacturing technology advances we either do or do not see.

Curry and I filmed this conversation on the production floor where Fullerton grinds its cutting tools. The facility is so clean it works beautifully as a set.

Watch the episode:

Not incidentally, this story is also a picture of the impact of the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), and the effect this show has on driving technology. The Fullerton team scrapped product and redesigned a tool that was already working to have it available in time for IMTS.

The Z Axis is my show about new directions in manufacturing, sponsored by Workforce Factor, a new platform for onboarding industrial employees that is tailored to the culture and tribal knowledge of individual workplaces.

If you are subscribed to this newsletter, then you are already a Z Axis subscriber, because I will include a post here about every new episode. But if you would like to get video content in its native platform (or if you would simply like to offer my work a vote of support!), you can also subscribe on YouTube.

Subscribe now

Subscribe on YouTube

Two major, overlapping reasons:

1. Additive manufacturing does significantly more than CNC machining. LPBF produces not just the part geometry, but instead the part geometry plus the microstructural properties of the material of which the part is made.

2. GRR builds confidence from repetitive measurement. Measuring the material properties produced through LPBF, among other metal additive processes, generally involves coupons produced for destructive testing. Destruction rules out repetition, so there is less opportunity to build a legacy of data.

Still, the data record is being built, however slowly. And LPBF has now been producing long enough that the volume of data available to some users is large indeed, perhaps transformatively so.

In short: Get enough data, and statistical confidence along the lines of GRR becomes possible. This is the new age of metal additive manufacturing we are now entering.

Haley Cook and I discuss this in the latest episode of Manufacturing Unlimited, produced by the ASTM Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence. Cook (seen above) is Senior Director of Operations for Metal Additive Manufacturing with ADDMAN, which is one of the LPBF users leading in terms of scale, history, and access to data. ADDMAN runs more than 50 LPBF machines across three sites in the U.S., and it has sizable destructive testing material data histories even for more obscure additive manufacturing metals such as C103.

I met with Cook at ADDMAN’s North Carolina facility (the largest of its LPBF sites), where she described what she and others within ADDMAN are coming to understand about the power of the volume of data now available for LPBF process characterization.

There is a threshold we are about to cross with additive manufacturing, she says. Statistical confidence will reduce our need to rely on 3D printed test coupons and destructive testing (such as tensile specimen testing, as illustrated in the images above). This in turn will expand the opportunities for additive, because destructive testing has been a tax on additive so far. Reduce the role and requirement for destructive testing, and additive manufacturing for metal part production will become cheaper and easier to use.

More in this episode:

For even more, Haley Cook will present on statistical validation for additive manufacturing at the upcoming International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (ICAM). Learn more and register via the button below.

ICAM 2026

Subscribe now

Share

Advance CNC Machining of Grove City, Ohio, says it has seen the prices of its typical solid-carbide end mills rise by 20 to 30 percent in the past year. And the higher price is not even the primary challenge. More concerning is what comes next, with cutting tool suppliers warning of additional increases to come, though amounts and timing are both uncertain. That uncertainty introduces volatility into a major cost component of machining that used to be stable, complicating quoting and long-term commitments.

In all of this, Advance CNC is not unique. What might distinguish this machining provider is the set of disciplines it has been able to bring to the problem. The company specializes in four- and five-axis CNC machining for aerospace and defense, supported by pallet-system automation. Its experience mixing ongoing production and short-lead-time jobs within these same platforms has fostered a culture that is simultaneously structured and adaptable, and thus better equipped than many manufacturing teams to respond to instability without sacrificing control.

Two of the company’s team members who have been focused on the response to cutting tool price changes are Tooling Manager Derek Maschmann (left) and VP of Machining Technology Kyle Dunaway (right). Both are helping to drive a set of evolving tactics aimed at containing the impact of this cost.

“It’s a really unstable market for carbide tools,” says Maschmann. Price increases are not even consistent from supplier to supplier. “It’s hard to make lasting decisions when you don’t know what it’s going to look like two weeks down the road.”

Yet they both also emphasize a principle that has not changed. Though tools matter, cutting tools still are not the dominant factor driving the economics or the success of any job. “Tooling is five to seven percent of your cost to machine a part,” Maschmann says. “If you can get more parts out the door, then an increase in the cost of the tool that lets you do this shouldn’t overly influence decisions.” This remains true even at higher prices.

In other words, responding to rising tool prices cannot come at the expense of throughput, control, or quality. Therefore, Advance CNC is addressing tooling cost through adaptation rather than compromise. The combination of tactics helping the company limit the impact of rising prices includes (A) more deliberately selecting tools to match machined features, (B) expanding the sourcing strategy, (C) resale of lightly used tools, and (D) exploration of alternatives to carbide. More on each below.

First, it is worth understanding how and why carbide prices began to shoot up in the first place.

Why Are Carbide Cutting Tool Prices Increasing?

The forces driving up the price of carbide tooling for a machine shop in Ohio originate on the other side of the globe. At the center of the change is tungsten, a necessary ingredient in carbide, which has become harder to source internationally. Global supply of tungsten is highly concentrated, with China dominating both mining and processing. Recent export controls by China over tungsten and other materials have constrained the supply.

Meanwhile, demand remains high. Aerospace and defense manufacturing, along with other expanding sectors such as semiconductors and the battery needs in automotive, continue to consume both tungsten and the high-performance tools made with it. Plus, cobalt—used as a binder in many carbide tool grades—is under similar supply constraints, adding to the pressure.

The result is not simply higher prices, but less predictable ones. Where cutting tool costs once tended to rise gradually and with some regularity, suppliers are now issuing increases that vary widely depending on the individual producers’ sourcing predicaments and levels of vertical integration. For machine shops dependent on cutting tools as an essential component of their work, this unevenness adds a new layer of uncertainty to the daily challenge of machining cost-effectively.

And Advance CNC accepts this shift as more or less permanent, say Dunaway and Maschmann. The volatility may settle out, but higher prices and faster-rising prices for carbide represent a structural change rather than a disruption. The economics of tooling are being reset by a combination of constrained raw materials, geopolitical influence and sustained industrial demand. That reality means lasting change is warranted as part of the ways a machining operation has to respond.

The Wrong Response: Chasing Lower Tool Cost

Faced with rising and uncertain tool prices, Dunaway says the most obvious response, to spend less on tooling, is also likely to be the least effective. Switching to lower-performance tools, running tools longer, or simplifying the tool library to reduce purchasing complexity all appear to offset higher prices, while what these steps really do is impair the success of the process and add greater cost elsewhere.

Again, tooling is five to seven percent of cost. Tooling price rises may raise that percentage. Yet other contributors to cost are apt to change to an even greater extent if the proper tooling investment is not made.

For example, lower-grade tooling saves purchase cost but brings shorter tool life, adding labor cost for more frequent tool change. Similarly, pushing tools deeper into their wear curve may extract more work from each tool on paper, but increases the likelihood of tool failure leading to unplanned intervention.

For Advance CNC, the conclusion is straightforward: Responding to higher tool prices by compromising on tooling is a losing strategy. The company’s approach instead starts by protecting what matters most—machine utilization and process stability—and then working to control cost within these constraints.

Automation as the Foundation of Tooling Strategy

As a result, any discussion of tooling for Advance CNC begins with automation. The company’s machining processes are built around palletized systems allowing horizontal machining centers to perform for extended periods of unattended operation. This kind of automation changes what matters in tooling. Because the process cannot be reliant on oversight or real-time manual process adjustment, consequential variables have to be known and controlled, including the condition of the tool.

The shop’s standard practice therefore involves beginning each production run with a new tool and replacing tools before any appreciable change in the edge. Never mind running tools to failure—there is not even any running tools to the onset of meaningful wear.

“We can’t put a tool with 80 percent remaining life into a process that might be expecting 100 percent,” says Maschmann.

This discipline obviously imposes a cost: Tools are not consumed fully; the value of a tool in terms of its usable life often is not realized. However, in an automated system, the cost of unpredictability far exceeds the value of obtaining an additional increment of cutting from any tool.

In this sense, then, the tooling strategy is not about the tool. The strategy focuses instead on assuring the integrity of the process. The tool price is not the only cost at stake, because managing tooling to preserve reliability also affects throughput, efficiency and delivery.

So how does the shop control tool cost within the constraint of these priorities, in which tool cost is not permitted to be a driving factor?

Advance CNC has found five tactics—all of them departures from the way it once sourced and managed tools—that fit the new reality of cutting tool pricing.

Tactic 1: More Deliberate Tool Selection (Less General-Purpose Thinking)

One of the clearest changes the shop has made in response to rising tool costs is a shift toward greater use of tools designed for specific operations. This shift is essentially an investment in greater time and attention for programming and tool management.

In the past, relying on general-purpose carbide tools helped make programming simpler and purchasing more efficient. But today, that tradeoff—fewer tools to keep track of, even if the tool is not the ideal choice for the cut—is harder to justify. Today, part programming more commonly goes feature by feature, with tools chosen for their suitability to each separate feature.

This has led to a broader and more specialized tool library, with individual tools selected for their ability to remove material faster, hold tolerance more consistently or last more predictably through some particular step in the machining cycle.

Some examples Dunaway cites: “We think carefully about just the right tool for small features, as well as the right tool for different cases of heavy stock removal.” In these cases, rather than doing well with an available tool that will serve the need, “We pick an optimized tool for that feature that lets us get closest to what that tool is best able to do.”

The shift places greater demands on the programmer to select just the right tool for each cut, and on tool management to oversee the expanded tooling array. Today, these investments in greater attention are prices worth paying.

Tactic 2: Multi-Sourcing and Price Leverage

Alongside technical decisions about how tools are used, Advance CNC is also addressing cost and uncertainty through new procedures in how tools are sourced. In an environment of stable tool pricing, developing a close relationship with one strong tool provider is advantageous. But in the new environment, the shop deliberately avoids becoming tied to a single supplier or even a small number of suppliers. The company instead maintains relationships with various tooling sources to maintain flexibility in pricing and availability.

The approach offers more than just a little savings, Maschmann says. The tungsten market changes are so dramatic and new that different tool manufacturers are often affected very differently by supply constraint shifts, depending on how vertically integrated they are and on their sourcing chain for the raw material. By maintaining multiple channels, Advance CNC can pivot its purchases to benefit from these differences.

Tactic 3: High-Performance Tools as a Cost-Control Strategy

Not only has it resisted lower-cost tools, Maschmann notes, but Advance CNC has in fact committed to the opposite course. The shop has shifted to even higher-performance tools in some cases, counterintuitively pursuing cost saving with even higher-price choices.

The reason is rooted in the economics of machining. If a higher-performing tool runs faster or maintains cutting performance longer within a predictable window, then those gains reduce cycle time or labor involvement. This kind of gain makes sense even in the absence of significant tool price rises. However, when the cost of tools in general is moving higher, stepping up to even higher-performing options in strategic cases becomes an expense that is more readily absorbable within the changed cost overall.

Stated another way: If tool cost is going to rise anyway, then work within that context to invest for savings in other areas.

Tactic 4: Resale of Lightly Used Tooling

This is perhaps the most extreme or unconventional of Advance CNC’s responses to rising tool cost: It has become a tool supplier.

Because the company does not run tools to the onset of significant wear, it routinely stores tools that still have significant usable life remaining. In the past, tools such as these sat in inventory waiting for some non-critical need. Today, Advance CNC recaptures cost by selling the tools. The company has launched a program to resell lightly used high-performance tooling that no longer meets the requirements of its automated processes. The tools seen in the drawer above are a sample of this lightly used inventory.

Selling these tools brings more return than carbide scrap. Meanwhile, for the shops buying the tools—smaller shops with less tooling budget—this secondary market for tooling meaningfully expands the tooling options available.

Tactic 5: Exploring Carbide Alternatives (PCD and Beyond)

Rising carbide costs are also prompting the Advance CNC team to revisit tooling options that previously held less appeal. Among these is polycrystalline diamond (PCD), a tool material that has long offered advantages in aluminum (the shop’s most common part material), coupled with cost and process considerations that are not as inhibiting as they once were.

Specifically, PCD tools have a high upfront price relative to carbide, and they require a different approach to machining. Cutting behavior and toolpath strategy differ from carbide, as does chip management, because the very fine chips produced by a PCD tool present challenges in chip evacuation over long runs.

All these differences have favored carbide in previous times, but now the balance is shifting. As carbide prices have destabilized, a tool offering long life and high performance in combination with a predictable price now warrants a careful second look.

Carbide will still be the predominant choice, Dunaway says. But he is spearheading the work of selectively evaluating where PCD cutting tools such as the one seen above can best add value within the constraints and priorities of Advance CNC’s processes. This includes assessing tool life, cutting performance, and how well a given tool can integrate into the automated workflow.

“We have to seriously evaluate where those tools make sense,” he says.

There was never a need to do this before. The assumption until now has been that cutting tools are generally carbide. Now, a lasting result of surging tungsten prices is likely to be greater application of non-carbide within a more diverse set of tooling options than what the shop was previously prepared to accept.

Implication for Aerospace and Defense Buyers

For aerospace and defense OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, volatile carbide tool prices are a supplier-side issue significant enough to ripple into quoting and lead times, but the ripples can be damped. The question is not solely whether suppliers are affected by the cost changes, but also how they are managing the effects.

A sophisticated machining supplier has tactics to employ that operate at points of leverage other than tool purchasing. More granular application of tooling, recapture of tool cost, and even doubling down on high-performance tools all are part of the response. The result is not immunity from cost increases, but insulation from the worst of their disruption.

In this way, rising carbide prices offer a test of supplier and system resilience. In fact, because some of the tactics include shifts away from reliance on foreign-sourced material, the result might be even more transformative. By encouraging a more widespread use of alternate tool materials such as PCD, the rising carbide prices may be helping to bring about not just greater manufacturing resilience, but greater independence as well.

Subscribe now

Share

Advance CNC Machining website

SLS can feel like the costliest polymer 3D printing process because it is generally used in industrial contexts, and because the detail of the parts it produces is so fine. In fact, SLS offers the potential to deliver the lowest per-piece cost among AM processes.

A few simple tactics help to deliver on this potential. They include tweaking designs to allow for maximum packing of parts within the build volume and (this is the underappreciated cost lever) designing to avoid thick walls.

Because there is so much potential for mild design changes to bring major cost savings, the first pricing quote for SLS is often misleading. Nate and I break this down in the video.

Watch:

Subscribe now

Share

Lifestyle Additive website

On the latest episode of The Z Axis, I visit Push Plastic to speak with the company’s president of global sales, Seth Hollingsworth. Push Plastic makes 3D printer filament, the long plastic strand delivered on spools that feeds extrusion-style 3D printers. 3D printer filament is often purchased on price, often regarded as a commodity, often ordered from producers in China. But Push Plastic manufactures its product with a U.S. workforce in a U.S. facility. I talk to Hollingsworth about the differences that distinguish filament and how the company succeeds against low-cost producers.

Also in this episode, we see the factory. Anyone with a desktop 3D printer will likely appreciate this view of how filament is made. Hollingsworth says he routinely confronts disbelief from new customers; they assume Push must be an importer, not a manufacturer. To help with correcting that view, I am happy to offer this visual record of 3D printer filament production being done in Arkansas:

Subscribe now

Share

The Z Axis is sponsored by Workforce Factor, your onboarding engine for industrial employees:

Workforce Factor

Cold Metal Fusion is a process for tricking a polymer selective laser sintering (SLS) machine into making metal parts.

The process was developed by Headmade Materials. CADmore Metal is the agent for the process working to develop applications for it in North America. We paid a visit to CADmore Metal for the lastest episode of Manufacturing Unlimited, sponsored by the International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (ICAM), where CADmore Metal’s John Calhoun (pictured below) has presented this technology.

The process is timely. SLS is a well-established polymer additive manufacturing process, and small low-cost SLS machines have recently come to market from various providers. The Cold Metal Fusion process, which is like metal injection molding (MIM) without a mold, uses a binder (like in MIM) to shape the part until debinding and sintering make the metal part fully dense. The process’s demands from the machine are low, so SLS machines at all levels can be used to make metal parts with this process. CADmore currently uses larger SLS machines from XYZprinting (visible in the first of the two photos above) and smaller machines from Formlabs and Sinterit (partly visible with John and me in the second photo) to make production metal parts, primarily in titanium.

The machines run in a kitchen. That was one of the discoveries upon visiting. Calhoun says CADmore Metal launched so fast, it was short on time to find a space. A former industrial kitchen was available. The space proved to be fitting for this process, which has relatively simple workflow and handling needs. Learn more in the episode:

Share

Subscribe now