Much like in any industry dealing with manufacturing parts, a lot of those parts, including gears, need to be prototyped or produced in small quantities.
So, using powerful, industrial-strength machines and tooling is often not economically feasible or efficient.
Enter Tormach and its line of machines and tooling specifically aimed at companies and facilities looking for relatively inexpensive and simple ways to bring designs and small jobs to life.
“If you rewind to 20 years ago, if you needed to make something on a CNC machine, you were using a machine that required either three-phase, 208- or probably 480-volt power,” said Daniel Rogge, CEO of Tormach. “You had a machine that was probably sitting on a reinforced concrete floor. You had a machine that was pretty hard to use. The controls 20 years ago were not user-friendly. You probably were going to at least a two-year trade school to get an education that would teach you how
to use it, and so it was really inaccessible to entrepreneurs. What we have tried to do consistently through the history of the company is make capable, affordable, easy-to-use CNC machines accessible to people that,
20 years ago, would not have been able to access that equipment.”
Creating new designs
That ability to create a new design is certainly a sell point for gear manufacturing for small shops and research facilities, according to Rogge.
“You can make a gear on a milling machine, so clearly you could do some prototype gear development with a mill and a 4th axis,” he said. “The customers that we sell to who are in the business of making gears are most likely using our equipment to build jigs and fixtures used in their manufacturing process. What we have is an inexpensive, easy-to-use tool that helps people build the support systems they need to engage in whatever primary manufacturing process they’re doing. Our lathes make round parts, and our mills make more complicated shapes. With specialized gear-making equipment, our machines would be great for keeping that running. And clearly, if you had a 4th-axis on one of our mills, you can easily prototype.”
Serving entrepreneurs
The majority of Tormach’s business falls into the business-user category, according to Rogge.
“A lot of those people are entrepreneurs starting a business out of their garage or out of their basement,” he said. “They want something that’s single-phase, easy-to-use, capable, cuts metal, and is accurate. They don’t need 1,500-inch-a-minute rapids, 2-G acceleration, and a 20-HP spindle. They don’t need that. And they value the ease-of-use and the affordability. They value the ecosystem of training materials that we’ve put together — the YouTube videos and things like that.”
But don’t let the entrepreneurial nature of Tormach’s customers be deceiving. From that base has come many well-known, established businesses that include SpaceX, Boeing, GE, NASA, Toyota, and Kia, according to Rogge. But when Tormach’s machines and tools are used by larger industry, it’s for that essential prototyping process.
“We do have some people using our tools for industrial production, but most of those larger established businesses are providing our tools to their engineers to rapidly prototype and to make sure their production machinists aren’t being tied up doing prototyping and iterative design work,” he said. “And the really smart ones recognize quickly that, by letting their design engineers prototype their own parts, their design engineers are being educated on how to make things and make their designs get better.”
Range of products
Tormach offers six different milling machines ranging in size from 1-HP to 6-HP, according to Rogge, as well as 1.5-HP and 3-HP lathes, a 2×4 wood router that can be used for aluminum and electronics enclosures, a 4×4 plasma table, a small desktop router, and a 6-axis industrial robot.
“Our largest machine is probably just about the same size as the smallest machines that you might find from larger industrial tool manufacturers,” he said. “Our smallest machine — it’s not quite desktop — you’ve got to have some amount of mass to be able to cut metal, but it’s pretty easy to navigate through a 36-inch doorway or down a set of basement stairs if you’re careful with it. And all of those machines, even the little 1-HP machine, are fully capable of cutting aluminum, steel, stainless, titanium, you name it, it just does, although it might take a little bit more time to get the job done than something with 20-HP.”
Tormach also offers about 3,000 individual SKUs ranging from tooling, tool holding, workholding — a whole range of 4-axis products.
Cast-iron alternative
Rogge said he is also quite proud of a new product that Tormach introduced this year.
“It’s our largest and fastest and most capable machine tool yet — we call it the 1500 MX,” he said. “The key thing that I want to highlight here is that the frame of this machine is not made out of cast iron. Most machine tools and milling machine lathes traditionally have been made out of cast iron, and one of the things you really have a hard time doing outside of Asia is cast iron. You can find foundries in the United States, but they’re very, very expensive, and part of that is it’s a very labor-intensive process to make a machine tool frame out of cast iron. This new machine that we’ve just released uses a material called ‘mineral casting,’ and it’s a silicon dioxide aggregate bound with epoxy. It was pioneered by a company called Studer in the ’70s. Studer called it Granitan, but its patents have long since expired. It’s a very high-end way to make a machine tool. It’s used on really expensive equipment, but we have found ways to bring costs down to where we can do this with our machines here in North America.”
Tormach’s 1500 MX offers significant benefits to traditionally manufactured cast iron, including dampening vibrations seven times better, according to Rogge.
“You get increased tool length; you get a much wider range of speeds and feeds that you can select before you start seeing chatter; it is thermally stable, so, unlike cast iron, when a shop heats up 10 degrees, this grows a lot less than cast iron would,” he said. “It’s like we’ve taken technology that Rolls Royce has been making for years and we’ve made it available at Kia pricing.”
Employee owned
One of the aspects of Tormach that make it a successful business is that it is a 100-percent, employee-owned company, according to Rogge.
“We don’t have a private equity owner who’s trying to squeeze profitability out of us; we don’t have a short-term view; we take a long-term view of business success,” he said. “One of the goals is we want the people that work for us to have rewarding, enjoyable employment — to really focus on our employee’s success because they’re all co-owners of the company. The way that might influence (Gear Solutions) readers is that when they call up tech support or they call up the salesperson, the person they get on the phone is a co-owner of the business.”
In addition to that, Tormach simply strives to help people make things, according to Rogge.
“That’s our mission statement, and we help people make things in a number of different ways, but primarily it’s by making accessible equipment — capable, affordable, easy to use, lift-gate deliverable, single-phase power,” he said. “We are very strong on the right to repair, so our control software is open source. You can go read the source code. It’s online. The circuit boards that are used in our machines, the design for those is open source. They’re available online. Any machine that we’ve sold over the past 20 years, if you have it, even if you buy it used and you call us up with the problem, we’ll talk you through fixing it. Another part of our philosophy is being fair to customers, to vendors, to members of the open-source community we participate in. We don’t participate in zero-sum behavior. We very much think that in order to win in business, we need to do so honestly, and so we’re very clear on being fair.”
Aiding with impressive accomplishments
That encompassing philosophy of being fair and open to its customers has allowed Tormach to be involved with companies with some impressive accomplishments on their resumes, according to Rogge.
“We have everything from deep-sea submersibles to stuff going into outer space; we’ve got a customer who puts cameras on sharks; we’ve got people making aircraft — it’s just wild,” he said. “When you make a tool that can be used by entrepreneurs to do prototyping and light production, you just get the most interesting applications. Our proudest moments are pretty much all tied to our customers’ success. I’ll say also, especially during COVID, we saw this wave of people starting businesses. We had a lot of entrepreneurs during COVID saying, ‘I’m going to quit the day job. I’m going to focus on this idea that I’ve had for a long time.’ When we see those folks able to make a living using our equipment, that’s a fantastic feeling. I think all of our proudest moments are tied to seeing our customers succeed.”
The future of automation
As Tormach continues to give its customers economical choices for manufacturing possibilities, Rogge said that, as he looks to the future, he sees automation being a key factor in making manufacturing and R&D more accessible.
“I talked about 20 years ago, if you wanted to use a CNC machine, you needed to go to a two-year college to get trained up on being a CNC operator, and now people are just buying equipment and learning how to use it by watching online videos and tutorials,” he said. “I feel like automation is at a state now where CNC equipment was 20 years ago, and I will be shocked if you walk into a manufacturing facility in 20 years and see an operator still standing there pressing a cycle start button all day long and moving pieces in and out of a mill. With the tight labor market that we’ve got now, the cost of automation coming down, the flow of information, the educational resources about automation — whether it’s robotic automation or more traditional industrial automation — I think we’re just going to see increased levels of automation in our industry.”
