"This is impressive!"

From little things, big things grow.

Everywhere on the 20-hectare campus of the US-based company A-dec you find evidence of this simple ethic. Amid the 16 modern buildings of the company headquarters in Newberg, Oregon, for example, sits the humble Army-surplus Quonset hut where the company was founded in 1964. Today A-dec is one of the world’s largest suppliers of dental office equipment.

A more recent small thing turned large at A-dec involves a cast iron coupling that houses a joint in the company’s popular dental-light assemblies. The joint allows dentists to swing the lamp anywhere above or beside a patient. The trouble for A-dec, which manufactures nearly all of its equipment on site, is that cutting a pocket for the setscrew that holds the coupling in place is torture on solid carbide end mills.

Until recently, the company was cutting through just 20 or 30 parts before its end mills failed. As Justin Kirkbride, a CNC operator with 16 years at A-dec, explains: “We run our machines against the most aggressive material out there – cast iron, heavy-gauge steel. The end mills often shear off right at the collet, which scars the inside of the collet, so we have to replace those, too. That takes time and is very expensive.”

Greg Pope, territory productivity engineer for Sandvik Coromant USA, approached the company with a solution, offering A-dec the opportunity to test Sandvik Coromant’s innovative CoroMill Plura HD, a solid carbide end mill designed for heavy roughing operations. A-dec agreed to try out the quarter-inch CoroMill Plura end mills on its couplings. The benefits were immediate and dramatic.

“You get past 20 or 30 pieces and think, ‘This is impressive,’” says senior programmer Brian Cappoen on the floor of the 34,000-square-foot milling department shop. “You get to 30 or 40 pieces and think, ‘Wow.’ You get to 60 or 70 pieces and think, ‘OK, can it do it again?’”

Time and time and again the CoroMill Plura proved it could replicate those amazing results. Part of the tool’s secret is a high-volume flute design that features an optimized differential pitch. This reduces vibrations and harmonics, enabling high cutting speeds and reducing wear.

“This shop is always busy and the materials we use are expensive,” says Cappoen. “We don’t have time to test a lot of things so if we’re going to do that, you have to bring the best you have and get right to the bottom line.

“What Greg brings is an approach of ‘What can I do to improve your business?’ He’s invested in our process.”

To see that cooperative spirit at work, next time you’re in a dentist’s chair, take a look at the setscrew that allows the arm of the dental lamp to pivot. Then consider how cutting that seemingly little hole with a CoroMill Plura HD helped A-dec realize a 253 percent increase in tool life – from 60 minutes to 212 minutes – with no chipping of the tool’s outer edge. That’s pretty big.

CoroMill Plura HD

Heavy users of round tools are all too familiar with the issues that can make them unreliable and limit their life spans. End mills, particularly those milling at high speeds, have a tendency to dull, chip and shear off after even brief use.

Sandvik Coromant’s CoroMill Plura HD end mills solve these problems with design innovations that dramatically upgrade the efficiency of heavy roughing operations. Undetectable to the naked eye, the tool’s optimized differential pitch minimizes vibrations, producing a high level of process security. The high-volume flute design enables full-slotting capability; dedicated end-tooth geometry allows the tools to deftly manage steep ramping angles. All of this has enabled commercial users to extend tool life with unchanged cutting data by as much as 253 percent.

With six new tool styles and 167 new tools, CoroMill Plura HD tools are cutting a new standard in steel, stainless steel, cast iron and heat-resistant materials.