Marking its 60th anniversary, the Sharp Tool Company in Hudson, Massachusetts, is a company that throughout its history has achieved a number of milestones, and in this landmark year the company has purchased five circular saw-blade grinding machines from Vollmer in an investment worth $1m.

The modern face of the business sees Sharp Tool manufacture upward of 700 saw blades every week, with over 4000 continuously on order and an additional 1000 HSS and carbide-tipped saw blades being serviced every seven days. Sharp Tool also supplies bandsaw blades and flat knives.
Even before orders land in the workshop, the company says it has witnessed a multitude of benefits.
Paul Morette, son of the company’s founder, states: “The surface finish and precision on our saw blades is much better than before. This will improve the service life of products for customers. In addition, by completing face and top grinding in a single set-up, we are improving consistency and overall quality. This has eliminated secondary set-ups and is saving us the equivalent of two employees a year; maybe $100,000 per annum in labour savings, as the guys don’t have to constantly run two machines. It also saves the guys from trying to load heavy 52” blades twice, from one machine to the next.”
From a productivity perspective, the new Vollmer machines are at least 40% faster than the previous Vollmer CHC20 machines they replaced. Factoring in the elimination of multiple set-ups and Sharp Tool Co is realising throughput improvements of 50% or more. The benefit to both the saw manufacturer and its customers is that lead-times will be reduced considerably moving forward.
For further information www.vollmer-group.com

HE&M Saw has created a number of custom saws over the years, but none more unique than the bespoke saw it designed for a decommissioned plutonium manufacturing facility located in Colorado. With the capability to cut through large blocks of compressed scrap, the custom saw can also be dissembled and reassembled to allow for transportation into the required facility.

In the early 1990s, a plutonium manufacturing facility in Colorado was decommissioned. The facility had produced plutonium for nuclear ordinance since the 1950s. As part of the deconstruction efforts, over 800 structures were demolished, and 21 tons of weapons-grade materials were removed. The demolition resulted in 1.3 million cubic metres of waste that was compressed into 0.9 m cubes and buried underground. Today, the plant is completely gone. However, it was recently discovered that some of the buried material was contaminated and leaking into the environment, so it had to be dug up and disposed of properly.
For correct disposal, a saw would need to cut the 0.9 m metal cubes into pieces small enough to fit inside 208-litre drums. The cubes were deemed hazardous and radioactive, and could only be processed in a radiation containment facility. The facility was isolated within 0.9 m thick walls and only accessible through a service door. Unfortunately, a saw with this capability usually stands at 3.6 m high, far larger than the human-sized service door. As a solution, HE&M’s engineering team designed a saw that could be dissembled by the customer, carried through the service door, and then reassembled to cut the compressed cubes.
This project provided the HE&M team with the opportunity to think outside the box and design a saw that could cut the product, while also fitting within specific facility constraints.
For further information www.hemsaw.com