Being the Best

It seems as if everyone has the "best" product you can buy. Whether it's a car or a can of soup, the marketing people will tell you their product is the BEST. But they're not so quick to tell you why theirs is the best. They hope that the consumer will take their word for it; that they'll obligingly buy into the claims and blindly believe the hype. And, since the approach is so wide spread, it must be effective.

Maybe we haven't been loud enough in our claim that our High Torque retention knobs are the best retention knob you can buy. Maybe we need to buy a late-night advertising spot on a national television station and have a spokesperson gesture madly while yelling the message out to the viewers. Or maybe we should just continue to do what we've been doing: making a claim and supporting it with facts.

Let's start with how our knobs are manufactured. We use 8620H hot rolled steel to produce most of the knobs, although tool steel is also used to make knobs that are used in the most demanding applications; we shot peen the parts to relieve stress; the knobs are deburred; our knobs have better finishes than the International Standards require; we maintain written inspection records on everymanufacturing lot; and they are made in the USA from materials manufactured in the USA. Is that what sets our retention knobs apart from all the others? Honestly, not ALL the others, but quite a few of them.

What makes our High Torque knobs different, and superior to the others, is that our knobs are designed and manufactured to eliminate problems that are precipitated by a standard retention knob. Simply put, a normal retention knob has the tendency to expand the top of the toolholder once it's installed, creating a distortion of the toolholder. This distortion is amplified by the application of torque pressure during installation. The distortion prohibits the tool holder from fitting properly in the spindle, resulting in movement of the toolholder during the milling process. The resultant effect of this movement is translated as run-out,vibration and increased harmonics, shortened tool life (especially in the case of carbide tools), poor finishes, spindle wear and tear, lower feed rates, and decreased rigidity. 

By lengthening the thread portion of the knob, eliminating unnecessary threads, and cutting the threads to start and finish at 180 degrees to each other, not only is the distortion problem resolved, but the retention knob is balanced which increases the overall balance of the toolholder. That's a whole laundry list of problems, and let's face it, expenses, fixed by the lowly retention knob and just a few bucks extra.