Sonic Tools co-owners Ludi Preinesberger and Scott Staylor with an American Arms PUG .22. Their tools machine every feature

on the gun other than the grip.

July 2015 | AdvancedManufacturing.org 61

CONTRACT PROFILE

Shop Solves Machining Problems with Creative Cutting Tools

Ed SinkoraContributing Editor

Taking the approach that “you need to

be able to think like a tool,” Sonic Tools

has provided customers with some truly

innovative solutionsI

f you’ve ever counted the wasted time of your tool

changes... Or watched impatiently as a ballnose end mill

made pass after pass as it cut a contour, on part after

part after part... Or thrown out another expensive tool

after what seemed like too few cycles, then you’ve probably

reached out to a custom tool manufacturer such as Sonic

Tools (Ashland, VA).

Founded by German immigrant Ludwig (Ludi) Preines-

berger and Virginia native Scott Staylor, Sonic started in

2000 as the US branch of Jabro Tools, a highly regarded

Dutch cutting tool maker. But when Jabro was absorbed by

a larger corporation four years later, the pair took on a silent

partner and bought themselves independence.

62 AdvancedManufacturing.org | July 2015

Since then they’ve grown to a full-time staff of 18 cover-

ing three shifts, running nine five-axis CNC tool grinders,

four cylindrical grinders, and a variety of support equipment.

That’s tiny by most manufacturing standards. But Sonic is well

equipped for a company in this fascinating little niche, and the

impact such a company has on the productivity of

the larger customers it serves can be enormous.

Tools Going Down the Drain?

Ridgid Tool Co. (Elyria, OH) offers a compelling

example. They needed to cut a T-slot through the

inside of a coupling used in one of their profes-

sional-grade drain rooters. Broaching required

expensive tooling and difficult setups, so it made

no sense to produce fewer than 3000 parts at a

time. This led them to try combining an end mill,

T-slot cutter, and chamfering tool in sequence, but

no one could produce a cutter that lasted more

than a few hundred parts. And the irony of throw-

ing so many cutting tools down the drain in trying to produce

a drain rooter wasn’t amusing.

Preinesberger decided to start from scratch and came up

with a devilishly complex staggered tooth cutter. Each tooth

starts with high rake and as the cutting angle “goes to 0” (i.e.,

no cutting action), the edge is relieved so there is no contact

at all. (The existing tools were plowing the material at this

point in the cut.) The next tooth attacks the part from the op-

posite angle but with the same high rake at the start and relief

at the bottom, and so on. The tool hogs out the material and

leaves the required shape without binding or excessive wear.

“It’s not that easy to figure out how to do it. There are a lot of details

in that little tool.”

Sonic’s target was at least 1000 parts per tool. With some

fine tuning of the process Ridgid has been able to get about

1500 parts per tool. Sonic’s design was also easily adapted

to different sizes, giving Ridgid the flexibility to cost-effectively

produce any member of the part family from bar stock, in

whatever quantity they required.

Why didn’t anyone else come up with a staggered tooth

cutter like this? Preinesberger said they probably did con-

sider such a tool, “but it’s not that easy to figure out how to

do it. There are a lot of details in that little tool.”

“You Need to be Able to Think Like a Tool”

Creating an optimally effective cutting tool requires a rare

combination of skills. The toolmaker must understand both

material properties and cutting dynamics, plus be able to

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CONTRACT PROFILE

Cutting the T-slot through this coupling was grossly inefficient until Sonic

developed the complex staggered tooth cutter at center. Each tooth starts

with an aggressive rake but is relieved at the base. Even the endface view

shows the complexity of this tool.

64 AdvancedManufacturing.org | July 2015

envision a new tool geometry that solves the riddle

at hand—then he has to figure out how to make

the thing. For Preinesberger, the process starts in

his own private machining simulator: “You need to

be able to think like a tool. You need to picture the

tool going through the material and the action that

is going to happen. You need to be able to picture

in your head what happens in that cut and during

that cut... Not everybody has it. I would say it all

comes down to 3D thinking.”

Some of Preinesberger’s skill is probably inher-

ent, but he points to years of experience in explain-

ing his ability, which like so many Europeans started

with a solid apprenticeship as a tool and die maker.

He was also an applications engineer with Walter

Maschinenbau for six years, grinding everything

from diesel fuel injection plungers to involute gear

forms, and in an intriguing twist spent years making

woodworking tools, where the need to cut parts for

joints forced him to diagnose how adjustments to

certain cutting tool features could correct mismatches. So it all

starts in the head, though Preinesberger quite happily pointed

out that today’s software makes it much easier to grind a

complex cutting tool once you’ve envisioned it.

Tinkering with Success and Getting Better 5% of the Time

Part business strategy, part insatiable curiosity, Sonic has

never focused on any particular customer base. They make

tools for everything from shotguns to tampon molds. Within

just the aerospace market, they’ve developed a “batwing”

cutter for a critical component in a jet engine’s reverse

thruster, form tools that cut cabin hanger eyelets in one shot,

and specialized milling cutters that replace a range of drills

and reamers for making holes in composites.

Details on the composite tools remain secret, but Sonic

worked with Swedish company Novator AB to apply their

portable orbital drilling technology. In this approach, a

diamond-coated Sonic cutter moves in an eccentric motion

around the hole center while rotating around its own axis and

feeding through the workpiece. This orbital (aka helical) drill-

ing process is particularly beneficial when drilling advanced

composites that are stacked in combination with aluminum

or titanium, because disassembly for deburring would be

impossible or too time consuming.

The common thread throughout Sonic’s developments is

a fear of nothing but failure. In Staylor’s case it started young.

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CONTRACT PROFILE

This tool cuts a critical component in a GE engine’s reverse thruster

apparatus. Preinesberger says most people would use a straight flute

for such a tool but his design’s aggressive rake is much more effective

on aluminum. He calls the resulting shape a “batwing.”

July 2015 | AdvancedManufacturing.org 65

He disassembled anything he got for Christmas by evening,

obsessed with figuring out how it worked. “I took apart my

dirt bike when I was 10 years old,” he said. “I had it spread

across my garage floor and was all excited. When my Dad

came home he said, ‘Well, that will

never run again.’ I had it running again

that night.”

When Jabro’s owner Piet Jannsen

asked the pair what made them differ-

ent Preinesberger answered that “95%

of the time Scott is constantly pester-

ing me with ‘Can we try it this way?’...

‘Can we do it like this?’...‘Can we do it

like this?’ I usually answer ‘This is how

you do it,’ and 95% of the time that’s

how we end up doing it.” Then Staylor

jumped in and finished Preinesberger’s

thought with “And 5% of the time, we

get better than everyone else.” Jannsen

approved, knowing that their constant

questioning and incremental improve-

ments would lead to competitive

advantages and sustainable success.

“Sometimes changes don’t make a tool better.

They just make it more expensive.”

But that doesn’t mean they are

constantly adding new tool features.

They are very conscious of the law of

diminishing returns. Staylor himself

said, “Sometimes the amount of time

and effort you would have to invest in

improving a product just isn’t worth the

possible benefits. Sometimes changes

don’t make a tool better. They just

make it more expensive.”

It Takes a Cool Shop to Make Cool Tools

Another thing Staylor figured out

along the way is that creativity and a

refusal to fail are contagious in the right

environment. So Sonic places a high

priority on the quality of their workplace. This led them to

seek out a facility they could buy and customize to fit their

needs, which they did in 2013. The offices are spacious and

pleasant, the production floor is polished and clean, lighting

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66 AdvancedManufacturing.org | July 2015

is excellent throughout, blanks and

grinding wheels are well organized,

and of course the machines are

modern and well maintained.

Unfortunately, company growth

and Virginia’s heat and humidity

conspired to make the place un-

bearable one summer. As Staylor

put it, “you’d go from your office to

the machine and it was so hot you’d forget what you were

doing when you got there.” So he rented a 25-ton air con-

ditioning unit to augment their existing system to get things

under control. To his amazement, their utility bills went down.

“That’s when the light bulb went off,” Staylor explained.

“All our machines have coolant filtration systems equipped

with chillers. But you’re taking that heat from the machines

and dumping it back into the air in the plant. The machines

are constantly fighting against themselves. I realized that we

could create both a better working environment and greater

machining stability if we removed the heat from the building.”

But how?

“In the old building,” he said, “we vented the air from our

largest coolant system to the outside. The problem is that

creates negative pressure in the building and you draw in hot

air from outside. The coolant filtration people will tell you that

you can separate the chillers from the filtration units and put

the chillers outside, but they’re really not designed to do that.

You could put the whole unit outside, but either way, you’d

have pipes carrying oil outside, which would introduce the

risk of a damaging spill and force you to build a big contain-

ment system.

“Also, although the chillers they use work for oil they are

designed for water. [As is typical, all Sonic’s machines use

oil coolant.] Their efficiency in chilling oil is a fraction of that

for chilling water, because the thermal diffusivity of water is

much better than oil.”

CONTRACT PROFILE

Mike Ribakov sets up the Reinecker

WZS 700 tool grinder, so named

because it can grind a 700-mm long

tool. He’s using NUMRoto software

and its 3D simulation, which is

sometimes a handy alternative to

WALTER’s Tool Studio software. There

are even a few tools on which Sonic

grinds some features in Tool Studio

and others on a NUM machine.

July 2015 | AdvancedManufacturing.org 67

Staylor concluded that the solution was to put a heat ex-

changer on each coolant filtration unit and a cooling tower out-

side. He designed and installed a system in which the oil from

each machine runs into the heat exchanger and then back into

the filtration unit, while propylene glycol

comes into the heat exchanger and

then back outside to the cooling tower.

The cooling tower requires just a few

hundred gallons of the propylene glycol,

which is chemically inert and poses no

risk to the environment.

Staylor retained the existing chillers

in the filtration units to serve as back-

ups and to augment the heat exchang-

er system during periods of heavy

material removal when a machine’s

temperature may rise more than 2°. So

the internal chillers don’t run much and

when they do, it’s only on one machine

at a time.

“The secret here is that we’ve cross-trained

almost everyone to run everything and to

design tools themselves.”

Sonic also invested in a variable-

speed air conditioning unit. It runs with

enough frequency to maintain circulation

and comfortable humidity, but automati-

cally adjusts its speed to what’s needed.

The system also automatically intro-

duces fresh air into the shop when the

outside temperature is cooler.

All told, the heat exchanger and

air conditioning systems cost Sonic

roughly $80,000 (not counting Staylor’s

engineering time). Staylor said the sys-

tem will pay for itself in electricity alone

in about seven years. More importantly,

he’s convinced it paid for itself in the

first year to 18 months by reducing the

scrap rate to under 3% and by improv-

ing morale during the summer.

“The people who work here are more important than

the people I work for,” he said. “They just are. Because if

they’re too hot, they make crap. If they’re happy, they make

great tools. So you concentrate on your staff.” But it’s not

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68 AdvancedManufacturing.org | July 2015

just improved morale that

cuts scrap. Staylor said it’s

virtually impossible to prevent

thermal growth in your ma-

chine tools if you can’t main-

tain a steady temperature

within the facility. He insisted

this is true even though some

of their filtration systems are

rated to maintain a constant

coolant temperature within

half a degree.

“The First Relationship is the

One You Have with Your Staff”

Despite the years of expe-

rience and raw talent that go

into designing custom cutting

tools and the big investment

in sophisticated software and

machines it takes to make them, Preinesberger and Staylor

are both convinced their business is built on relationships,

starting with the staff.

“The machines are a commodity,” said Staylor. “Every

tool grinder has a Walter machine, or an ANCA. Not every-

one has a Reinecker, but there are other machines that run

NUM software. There are advantages to having two different

software suites under one roof, because they each have their

strengths. But that’s not our secret. The secret here is that

we’ve cross-trained almost everyone to run everything and to

design tools themselves.

“They want to research to find out why something doesn’t

work. Because they like the customers. It’s all about relation-

ships. And the first relationship, the one that starts every-

thing, is the one you have with your staff.

“The other day I mentioned to Mike [Fischer, Production

Lead], that a customer doesn’t like an aspect of a certain tool

we make. I went back to the office and got involved in 9000

other things, but I soon found out that Mike and the guy who

made the tools had both gone online and looked up every

single thing they could find on that particular application...the

material properties, its hardness, how it cuts, the convention-

al wisdoms... I didn’t tell anyone to do anything. I didn’t prod.

I just mentioned that we needed to look at this. They did it on

their own. Because it’s contagious. The desire to be the best

is contagious.”

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CONTRACT PROFILE

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