High-quality tool sales on the rise

By Staff -- Industrial Distribution, 8/1/2000

Industry experts anticipate flat sales of cutting tools this year combined with an ongoing increase in demand for high-end and specialized tools.

The U.S. Cutting Tool Institute's current business report index, which measures net domestic billings for about 90 cutting tool companies, indicates slightly lower billings for each month of the first quarter. The differences range between one-half and 1.2 percent, and USCTI's executive director Chuck Stockinger says the declines aren't statistically significant.

Last year, orders increased by one or two percent over 1998. Stockinger says the numbers must be interpreted with two guidelines in mind: one, sales of cutting tools are sensitive to general economic activity and two, they tend to directly reflect industrial production.

"Sales are flat with last year, and essentially last year was a pretty good year," Stockinger says. "This is the face of what now appears to be a slowing economy."

Joe Constance, owner and president of Keyline, Inc., dba Magafor, in Turner, Mass., says cutting tools is not a growth business because technology is improving. The company distributes French-made Magafor tools.

"You may see less consumption because the tools are higher quality and last longer," Constance says. "There's more emphasis than ever before on a good quality tool that lasts longer, cuts faster and lowers production costs."

Over time, Constance believes the product mix will change with increasing sales of high-tech application tools, carbide tools and coated tools. The high-tech application tools are designed to be reliable when used around the clock, often in machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Constance likens the switch from high-speed steel to carbide tools to going from flying a prop-driven plane to a jet. Stockinger also says tools coated with substances such as titanium nitride are gaining in popularity, also for productivity reasons.

Distributors like Jeff Sheats of Sheats Supply Services, Inc. in Indianapolis, Ind., agree that coated and carbide tools are hot sellers. Sheats says buyers prefer indexable carbide tooling with a throwaway insert. "The machines run faster now at the spindle where the metal is cutting down and the cutting tool technology had to improve with it," Sheats says.