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With decades of manufacturing experience and thousands of cutting tools in stock, Garr Tool knows that a reliable, high-quality product is key to keeping loyal customers—whether the tool is made today, tomorrow, or twenty years from now.
Dependable Quality
The company’s focus on in-stock inventory makes it critical that Garr Tool maintains a high production rate and consistent quality year over year. Manual measurement methods can yield fluctuating numbers, but ZOLLER machines like the »genius« and »titan« make it possible to lock tool measurements down and keep them tight and repeatable.
John Leppien, Vice President of Garr Tool, said customers will get the same results across tools, regardless of which batch and lot they came from. “It’s locked in. It’s the same tool, it performs the same,” he said.
Ease of Use
At some long-standing companies like Garr Tool, getting employees to use new technology can be a challenge. But ZOLLER has made it easy for operators to adopt more modern manufacturing.
Many of Garr Tool’s operators have decades of experience grinding the “old way” using methods like mohawks, shadowgraphs, and dial indicators. Those processes are still used, but employees now confirm their measurements with ZOLLER machinery.
“They've embraced that because it's made their job easier in some regards,” Leppien said. “Everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing, can make adjustments, and understand what they're trying to create.”
Enabling Precision Tooling
This is especially important when measuring tools that are so small they can’t be inspected with the human eye. Trevor Leonard, Quality Control, gave the example of Garr Tool’s high-performance aluminum cutters, which have polished flutes and other intricate features.
“Say you're checking 5% rake depth on a tool that's only 1/32, you're talking… a curve of 1 thousandth, 1.5 thousandths,” Leonard explained. “That’s something that you couldn’t inspect visually or even on standard equipment.”
With so many variances in a small space, Garr Tool relies on the ZOLLER »genius micro« tool inspection machine for quality control.
“The benefits of the »genius micro«, definitely as far as the smaller tools go, is to be able to do things that by eye are incredibly hard to do,” Leonard said.
Powering Future Innovations
It’s also useful when Garr Tool wants to expand its ever-growing inventory with new cutting tools. For example, Garr Tool recently introduced a new series of tooling that requires two coatings. Edge hone had to be dialed into the microns, with no room for human error.
To get the results he was looking for, Leppien turned to the »titan«, a high-end tool measuring machine capable of automatically measuring over 100 parameters in both 2D and 3D.
“I get my edge hone. I know exactly what this is. The operator can make his adjustments, whatever he needs to do,” Leppien said. “The »titan« was instrumental in getting it here for this new series of tooling.”
Driving Time Savings
Checking the outside diameter, rake, and other tool measurements of existing inventory can be time-consuming. But Leonard said ZOLLER machines can verify the important aspects of a tool with the push of a button.
“There are a lot of things that you can do [with ZOLLER] that you simply wouldn't be able to do without either destroying the tool or taking a long time and checking multiple tools in an order,” Leonard said. “You can check everything in say, a seven to ten minute program.”
Key to Success
Ultimately, the »genius« and »titan« integrations were made possible by parametric programming, which can create or edit 50,000 tools overnight by using existing nominal data and feeding it to the system through a parser. There is no need for programming at the tool inspection machine, and all the programs follow an optimized and uniform strategy.
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