Keller Engineering, a 31 person Torrance, CA Job Shop, recently looked to Emuge to solve a demanding cutting problem.

"Actually it was a technical problem," said founder Albert Keller. "We had a 5/16ths internal thread to be cut inside a titanium rod that is inserted into a broken tibia (leg bone, Ed) to add strength until it heals. When we started we produced the part on a Star Lathe, but the problem was we just couldn't go as deep as the customer wanted. So, we found ourselves finishing the threads by doing manual sinking and tapping, which was slow and expensive. We had 4,000 parts to make, so we went to Westec 2002 in search of a better, faster way to do it."

At Westec Keller visited the Emuge booth and talked to their technicians about the possibility of thread milling.

"I knew about thread milling," Keller says, "but I didn't think it could be done on such small diameters. The Emuge people guaranteed us their cutting tool could do the job, so we decided to give it a try."

According to Keller, the Emuge people visited his plant and supplied him with the CNC g-code needed to do the job perfectly.

"Once we decided to buy their cutting tools, they gave us the software which specified feed, speed and coolant for the operation. They made it really easy for us, gave us really good service. They also told us that we could make at least 2,000 threads with one tool without problem and they were right. I don't have the figures handy, but that switch saved us a lot of money and certainly boosted our profits on the job. We use a lot of different kinds of cutting tools here, including Emuge. We always try to find the right tool for the job."