After years of equipment breakdowns, this shop owner decided he’d rather make parts than repair tired machine tools. He’s never been happier.
Dean Kauffman makes rollers. He makes them by the thousands. Big rollers, small rollers, all used by steel mills to make the round, square, and rectangular bar stock that other manufacturers then turn into something else. Kauffman likes to think of these mills as giant Play-Doh Fun factories, squeezing red hot steel through a progressively smaller series of funnels and rollers until they reach their final shape. The rollers, however, are anything but fun to machine, made of hardened D2 tool steel and accurate to within +/- 0.0005″.
Shown here are a few of the hardened D2 tool steel roller guides produced by Hot Rolling Technologies.
The equipment he uses? A KLR-20 CNC (presently upgraded to the KLR-200 model) lathe purchased from KENT USA® a year ago. Aside from marrying his wife, he says it was probably the best decision he’s ever made.
Dean Kauffman says buying the KLR-20 CNC lathe from KENT USA® was the best machine tool decision he’s ever made
Take me to the river
Kauffman’s shop is in Paducah, Kentucky, a relatively small city at the intersection of neighboring Arkansas, Illinois, and Tennessee, “about as far west as you can go without getting wet,” he said. It’s appropriately named: Hot Rolling Technologies Inc., and the only two employees are him and his wife—he makes the parts, she does everything else.
Dean Kauffman with his wife in front of their new facility in downtown Paducah.
She’s been a lot less busy in the purchasing department since they bought the new KENT USA®, however, because his tool life has tripled. “There’s no vibration, the cuts are smooth, and the tools now last forever,” said Kauffman. “And it’s quiet. If there weren’t an Andon light on top, I wouldn’t know whether it was running or not. I freaking love that machine.”
He once had a much larger shop—Equipment for Rolling Mills—but sold it a few years ago. It was getting too hard to find employees, he explained. That, and much of the equipment he had there was older, purchased years earlier from a well-known machine builder that has since been acquired by another well-known machine builder, and Kauffman was getting a little tired of replacing motherboards and drive motors. So when a friend mentioned that he’d like to start his own shop, Kauffman handed over the keys, moved back into his original building in downtown Paducah, and started over.
This time, however, he decided to take a different approach to machine tools. “I was getting pretty good at patching the old ones back together, but seeing as it’s just me out there now, the last thing I wanted was to spend all my time fixing machines and not making parts. That’s when I started buying new stuff.”
Lessons learned
His first purchase was not a KENT USA®. Nor was his second. Both machines have since been sold, one of which he “absolutely hated. I couldn’t turn my smallest roller without the thing chattering across the floor.” He then turned to Glen Goins, president of Amerigo Machinery Co., who had recently started a machine tool dealership with KENT USA® as a flagship line.
“I knew Glen when he worked for another dealer, and he’s always been there for me,” Kauffman said. “Unlike some of the others that I’ve worked with over the years, he has his own service people, and when you call for support, they don’t transfer you to some help desk clerk who doesn’t know anything about machine tools.”
As it turns out, he hasn’t needed much help because the KLR-20 has been running flawlessly for the past year. “I’m shocked at how well that machine holds size,” he said. “It cuts the exact same size in the morning that it cut the previous afternoon, and when I tell it to move two tenths, it moves two tenths. I never have to fiddle with anything, and as I said before, the tool life is hugely better. It’s just an amazing machine.”
Rolling forward
It’s amazing enough that Kauffman recently purchased his second piece of KENT USA® equipment, a KVR 2418 machining center equipped with a 15-hp, 10,000-rpm chilled spindle, 25 tools, and FANUC 0i-MF 4+1 axis control. It’s so new that he hasn’t had much experience with it, but noted that another friend of his bought the same machine and “loves it to death.”
Hot Rolling Technologies latest machine tool investment, a KVR-2418 vertical machining center from KENT USA®
Oh, and those funnels mentioned at the start of the story? Kauffman is quoting on a mating component—a friction delivery guide, made of 316 stainless steel—while at the same time dealing with increased roller guide sales. “One customer has tripled their orders over the past month or so, and we’re looking at some other parts for the new machining center,” he said. “Altogether, roller guides are only about one-third of what we do here, with the rest of my time spent on the design and fabrication of related equipment for the steel mills. It’s not romantic work, but it is important, and thanks to the KENT USA® machinery, it’s become a whole lot easier. They’re both very rigid, stable, and accurate machines.”
Small but capable, Hot Rolling Technologies has all it needs to service the steel industry.
All photos courtesy Hot Rolling Technologies
