Why New Zealand Needed an Experienced Custom Cutting Tool Manufacturer

How local infrastructure cuts downtime, protects jobs in New Zealand and lets Kiwi manufacturers compete on quality, speed and price.

For far too many years New Zealand manufacturers were limited to importing customs and even most of their standard tools from overseas at the mercy of someone else’s timetable and logistics. When the tool you need takes weeks to arrive, the machines that make your product usually don’t run until that tool arrives. That gap in the local industry is exactly what inspired the start of Carbide Tools in 2018, we wanted to put the capability back on shore and give New Zealand a fair chance at being more self-sufficient than ever before.

Pains & Problems

Importing tools from overseas brought many negative realities with it but two that we heard most commonly were: Long lead times and no meaningful local support to help point them in the right direction. A single custom cutting tool that is critical to a company’s job, problem or process can leave production lines idle for days and sometimes week when they wait for tools that are coming from overseas. Those hours and days are never recovered and can be detrimental to a business, and in turn all the New Zealanders employed by them. Having no meaningful local support to guide businesses through whatever obstacle they are facing, often means that a salesman is pushing them to use standard tooling from a catalogue of imported tools that very rarely match the exact geometry that is required by their unique problem. This often results in poor finishes and wasted money being thrown at extra passes and excess materials. The combination of these import short falls makes New Zealand businesses less nimble and more expensive than global competitors.

Supply Chains on Thin Ice

On top of the negative realities that come with importing tools, the ruthless consequence of relying completely on overseas industries to supply New Zealand’s tooling is the instability of the international shipping and supply chain. The breakdown of supply and shipping as we have seen in recent years doesn’t care about the size of your business or the urgency of your jobs, smaller markets are hit harder and often don’t recover. When these shipping delays hit, what used to be a few weeks is now a month or two at a minimum and suddenly a planned production run has collapsed with no way to plan around it.

Opportunity & Solutions

The fix was obvious to us: make the tools locally to foster a more stable and sustainable industry in New Zealand. Local tooling manufacturing cuts lead times from weeks or months down to days and gives customers options when and as they need them. Cutting tools that are designed and manufactured with custom geometry that is customer specific provides businesses with the unique ability to send tools back to us for regrind, meaning longer life, fewer setups and predictable costs. Being able to talk directly to the people designing the tool and make changes in real time, saves far more than the initial tool price. If New Zealand wants to keep making the high-value, quality components that are produced locally then the tooling capability to innovate and refine is a non-negotiable.

The Solution in Action

We saw the gap in the local market and our passion for what we do drove us to build the solution ourselves. So we officially started Carbide tools in 2019, and we are proud to be the most experienced manufacturer of tungsten carbide cutting tools in New Zealand, with capabilities that easily compete with other global leaders in custom tooling. Having started their first business in 1997 with one manual machine in their garage at home, Paul & Vanessa knew what the sacrifices looked like and they were ready to invest everything they had to start from the beginning with Carbide Tools. Just like the early days in that garage, the late nights and small batches of tools paid off and the phone slowly started to ring. What we do can be noisy, precise and stubborn work, and that is exactly why it mattered to us that someone did it properly to a standard that hadn’t been set in New Zealand.

What we do differently

We make custom tools with unique geometries that can be reground multiple times, and we make changes when and as they are needed so that our customers don’t have to compromise. We don’t sell cutters for the sake of a sale, every business and customer that has dealt with us knows that we encourage open conversation and transparency at every step. Our cutters are almost always regrind-able given that they are taken care of, and this does mean that the up front cost can be more than a standard cutter from overseas. But that price also buys the low cost of being able to in some cases get up to 10 tool lives out of that one cutter, this gives businesses the ability to predict costs and rely on sustainable tooling. Making our tools locally means that we can guarantee premium raw materials, consistent accuracy and traceability with all of the tools we produce. We recently worked closely with a customer that was doing big production runs and designed one unique tool for them to do the job they had been doing with 3 separate tools, cutting their set up and cycle time by 24%.

Outcomes & the broader effect

The benefits are quite straight forward: smaller lead times, less downtime, less wasted materials, less money being spent on avoidable fixes and faster adjustments to get the job right the first time. Beyond the workshop, the local manufacture of tooling keeps skilled jobs onshore and helps entire supply chains stay grounded in New Zealand. Not having to wait weeks for a replacement cutter means your production and workflow run smoothly. Our customers often tell us a variation of the same thing that René from Allied Industrial Engineering said: “Our machines were standing idle and the team at Carbide Tools worked efficiently to get the tools to us in a matter of days and delivered gracious customer service with a level of detail and quality tools like no other.”

The reality

To be clear, local tooling does not erase every challenge and problem that New Zealand faced before, but it does shift the balance and gives manufacturers options they simply didn’t have before. Raw materials still need to be sourced from overseas and some highly specialised geometries can take a bit longer to work out as often we are making tools that have never existed before, so these elements can take time. We are working on shrinking the gap by investing in new technology, the right machines, unique training and strong local partnerships.

Future Proofing

Local tooling lets New Zealand manufacturers pursue higher value work because they can make changes, adapt on the fly and control quality with custom tooling. Our best work has been collaborative: the customer brings us a hand sketch with their ideas, we have a conversation about what they are cutting, how we can improve their current process and send them back a simulation of the proposed solution before they sign off on the design so that we can together create the solution that didn’t exist. Every tool we make helps train a machinist and a cutter grinder and keeps skills and knowledge in our local economy. In the next 10 years, local tooling capabilities will be the quiet difference between industries that thrive, survive and those who struggle.

The Bottom Line

New Zealand needed an experienced local custom cutting tool manufacturer, and now it has one. Thanks for reading from Matt and the Carbide Tools family.