VIDEO: TOOLING UP – Pro Tips for Every Job with Kennametal

Narrator: This video is brought to you by Kennametal, Transforming How Everyday Life is Built. Welcome to Tooling Up, a series by MSC Industrial Supply Company. The show that provides real world insights and is brought to you by leading industry experts aimed at improving the efficiency and productivity of your operation. And now the host of Tooling Up, Mitch Free.

Mitch Free: Welcome to Tooling Up, a series dedicated to increasing productivity in the manufacturing industry. I'm Mitch Free. If you're new here, be sure to subscribe and hit that like button. Our guest today is Keith Hoover, Regional Product Manager at Kennametal. Keith, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today. 

Keith Hoover: Yeah, thank you, Mitch. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to be here and get a chance to participate in this Tooling Up series.

Mitch Free: Absolutely. I'm always curious when our guests join, about how they got into the business and what their path was, if I understand it. Did you start out like on the shop floor? 

Keith Hoover: Yeah, that's right. I actually started out in a student machine shop in college, and so I would help other students learn how to crank handles and cut chips. I graduated and then I came into the industry. I started working for a small shop as a manufacturing engineer. It was great. I got to make a lot of the fixtures myself. I was part of a bunch of tooling programs there, so I was deciding what cutting tools we were going to put on the machines and really standardize and improve efficiency in that shop. And then I got the opportunity to come make cutting tools. And it's a whole new world here. I love it. 

Mitch Free: Wow. That's a perfect progression. I mean, to be in your role, right? You really needed to have gotten your hands dirty, made chips, see what worked, what didn't work, what shops struggle with. One of the things that I love about this industry is just the constant pace of innovation. You know, we take tools that people from the outside looking in would think there's just no innovation left. And we make them better and better and just constantly enhance the use cases. I know Kennametal is really good at that. I'd love to hear more about KenTIP and that platform and specifically GOtip.

Keith Hoover: Oh yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right. There's always new innovation. There's the basic stuff. New PVD coatings. We're always trying to get higher heat resistance, slower friction, stuff like that. We’re making developments. But it's always good to try to think out of the box. Where's that next really big, meaningful innovation going to come from? And you mentioned the KenTIP FS. And that's really where a big, big innovation was industrywide, was the modular drill. We had solid drills, one solid chunk of material, whether that was high speed steel or cobalt or carbide. And then we had indexable drills. So you had a little chicklet, a little insert in there, that you could change out. But we were really lacking that intermediary drill where you got all the benefits of the really complex solid carbide drill point geometry with the benefits of not having to invest in, you know, 6 inches of 3/4-inch carbide. So we have a modular drill now that's a steel body and just some type of modular chip, whether it's the KSEM that screws on or is the KenTIP FS that has a CAM lock twist on. And basically it's like taking the end of a solid carbide drill, you cut it off and you put it on top of a steel body. Massive economic benefits over large sizes of solid carbide drills. 

Mitch Free: Oh wow, that’s fantastic. So just the benefits are just running through my mind here. So if you've got different materials and you need different geometries are there different tips for that?

Keith Hoover: Yes. So Kennametal prides itself on being a high-performance, full-service provider brand. And so we're trying to deliver really high productivity geometries and tools while also making sure that we cover the entire gamut of what a customer might need. And so that plays into exactly what you were talking about. We have high-performance geometries that are application and/or material specific, but we also just came out with an expansion on the KenTIP FS. It's the GOtip and that is our general-purpose insert for the KenTIP FS that can work in any material — steels, cast irons, nonferrous alloys, super alloys. It's fantastic. It's really working well across the board. 

Mitch Free: Keith, take me through some of the specifics and the benefits as compared to conventional drills.

Keith Hoover: Yeah, I'm really glad you gave me the opportunity to talk about this. The KenTIP FS has undergone a lot of expansions over the last couple of years. It's really a full platform at the moment and we're really excited to be able to offer such a broad portfolio that can handle really just about every application that a customer can throw at us. And so we've got combination tool bodies that will do drill countersinking. We've got different tool bodies that have straight flutes or spiral flutes depending on your application, whether it's a lathe or a mill or maybe we've got some really challenging application details that we're coming up against. We've got a huge range of inserts, whether they're the high-performance, material-specific point geometries or the high-performance, application-specific geometries or the new GOtip, general-purpose insert where we've got a couple inserts that are capable of pilot drilling for the other high-performance inserts, thereby making this a one-stop platform for pilot drilling and then deep drilling. We've got short and then standard length drill bodies as well as longer 12xD drill bodies. And these drill points and the bodies themselves are capable of drilling this 12xD deep hole without a pilot drill in some applications. And in most applications where we have a really clean surface to start on, we've got a really good setup, we're going to be able to drill that deep without a pilot drill. And of course, like I said, we've got the inserts that are capable of pilot drilling when we do have a really challenging start or we've got challenging conditions in the middle of the cut.

Mitch Free: Keith, this has been super informative and your domain expertise and your passion comes through in spades. It's been a real, real pleasure chatting with you.

Keith Hoover: Thank you very much. It's really easy to be excited about our products and really easy to get excited with our customers and what we might be able to do together.

Mitch Free: If you enjoyed our talk with Keith as much as I did, please subscribe to our channel where you will find many more great interviews just like this one. To learn more about the modular Go Drill system and the entire KenTIP platform, visit www.MSCdirect.com/kennametal. See you next time on Tooling Up. 

Narrator: Want more insights and ideas to improve the efficiency and productivity of your operations? Check out the Tooling Up video playlist to hear tips that can take your company to the next level. And subscribe to our channel so you won't miss out.