Layers of Control [Cutting Tool Engineering, September 2002]
Thanks to the likes of The Home Depot, Lowe's and Menards, DIY (do-it-yourself) is ingrained in American homeowners' minds. It may not be long before CIY, or coat-it-yourself, is entrenched in the heads of U.S. toolmakers
With the growing availability of affordable tool-coating equipment, shopfloor tool coating is emerging as a manageable and cost-effective process. Given increasingly stringent demands from cutting tool customers for just-in-time delivery and toolmakers' desire to assume greater control over their products, something that has for years been deemed a sourced technology may soon develop into another in-house task.

We've Come a Long Way
Chemical vapor deposition and physical 		vapor deposition thin-film, wear-resistant coatins entered the cutting tool mainstream in the late 1960s and early 1980s, respectively. Today, they are accepted components of the overall tooling "system" that combines those materials with tool design and substrate selection and preparation. In many cases, the coating has evolved into the most important factor for optimizing the performance of certian HHS and carbide tools. In fact, a number of tool designs are only effective if coated.
Nevertheless, tools that should be coated are not, because the process is often an afterthought and sufficient time is not allotted for coating.
A way to allay this problem is in-house coating, and tool manufacturers--large suppliers as well as small and medium-size ones--should also 		recognize this. They should see the move as a way to gain more control over the process and to eliminate shipping tools back and forth between themselves and the toll coater, and the risk of tools--particularly carbide ones--being damaged during shipment. Benefits can be garnered on the cost side, too.

The Price is Right
For years, large tool manufacturers and some large end users have operated in-house coating centers. They have the volume of tools to justify the capitol


Above: While tool-coating equipment has come down in price, it has maintained a level of sophistication that allows "designer" coatings to be applied, as well as more traditional compositions.