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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