Micro Drills
Drilling small holes is our specialty-we’ve been doing it since 1937. One of the keys to drilling small holes is the drill-it needs to hold up when drilling holes as small as .001’’. It is pretty remarkable that we can drill a hole that small thru stainless steel.
We added a new cnc drilling making machine a couple of years ago for making drills. It has allowed us to produce micro drills faster and more consistently than we could before. We have used it to produce drills with different geometries to meet the wide variety of needs of our customers. It has helped us bring our lead times down on many drilling jobs as we can often produce the tooling needed for the job instead of ordering and waiting on outside vendors. We’re still learning how to “make that machine sing” (the learning process never really ends), but our drill making plays an integral part of our micro hole drilling process.
We still make micro tooling for sale, including spade drills (carbide or high speed steel), reamers, punches and broaches. We haven’t entered the market yet for other types of micro tooling, but stay tuned!
Diverse Businesses
The founder of National Jet Company, John Cupler, originally worked for the local Celanese plant and came up with a better way to drill holes in their spinnerettes. Many people and companies still know National Jet Company as a U.S company that specializes in making spinnerettes for the man made fiber industry.
And it is still a big market for us. We make spinnerettes for carpet fiber manufacturers, spinnerettes for artificial grass, outdoor furniture, and fishing line. We make spinnerettes for spunbond fiber, meltblown, filtration, slit film and specialty markets.
But in the last 2 decades, we have become a world leader in the manufacturing of parts for other industries. We now have dedicated equipment for making nozzles for 3D printers, nozzles for ink jet printers and nozzles for industrial glue dispensers. We make parts for the solar panel industry, the medical industry, aerospace and telecommunications industries as well as parts for defense contractors.
We still focus on precision machining and micro hole manufacturing. We now do it for a lot of different industries and products for companies around the world.
More Equipment; More People
The past 6 months has seen National Jet Company add more new equipment in that time frame than ever before. We have just added a new tool grinding machine which should really help with our transition drills and specialty drills; it will hopefully help cut down on lead time for tooling and help us continue to improve lead time for all parts.
Additionally, we have added a new employee in the micro drilling section. It’s a long lead time to develop this skill, but our shop keeps growing and we are moving to keep up with our customers’ demands.