A New Source for Laser Drills

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Matties: And they have a lot of them.

Sekine: We sold more than 800 machines in the U.S. From that time on, we have been supporting our customers. They see us as people they can trust. Of course they trust Hitachi, but prior to trusting Hitachi they trusted us—our people. We also have a lot of customers already asking us, "Can you just take care of the service for Hitachi machines?" We do that as well.

We have a service engineer who worked for Hitachi for more than 20 years. Those companies are joining us because we can support them. A lot of people are asking us to do that. Why is that? Because they believe we can do it, and also we have been giving them good support. I don't see many problems once we can deliver good quality machines. With our support, our customers will stay with us. They know we don't just turn around and say goodbye.

Matties: Where are the machine parts being manufactured for the U.S.?

Sekine: Right now it is all done in New Hampshire.

Matties: Is the laser your technology?

Sekine: We don't make the laser head itself. We have many laser companies supporting us. They're willing to let us use their laser as a demo. We don't just say, "We only use a specific laser head manufacturer." We use the laser that will best fit the customer's requirement. All the laser companies know we're very small and that we're just a start-up. However, we have a lot of inquiries from customers to give them application support.

Matties: How many people do you have currently working in your company?

Sekine: About 10.

Matties: When you look at your company, where do you see it in maybe five years?

Sekine: In about five years, we need to have somewhere around 50-100 people. We need to have it, but I'm not planning to make all the machines here in the U.S. The biggest thing is we just need to make it, and then later outsource to the partner back into Asia to make the base. They have a big capacity to do that.

Matties: Is Asia already in this industry?

Sekine: They are in different industries, like consumables. However, they are the machine tool manufacturers supporting the consumable area, and that makes them very successful.

The biggest question I get is, "Okay, Sam, that's good, you started up the company, how long is it going to last? How much money do you have?" That's very important. Our partner supporting us has been really good. They aren’t involved in anything with the daily business; that's my responsibility. They don't touch me, so I can do whatever I see fit. They support whatever we need, and we have been very happy working with them. In the meantime, we’ve had at least two companies working along with us. Once we get these big orders we will be okay for two or three years, but we need to have more people so we can make those machines. Quantity-wise, of course, these companies also are asking me, "Are you sure you can support these numbers?" Yes, we can support them by working with the partner facility in Asia and integrating them with what we make in New Hampshire.

Matties: Your partners must have some line in the sand, though. They have to say, "We have to hit some performance measurements, and if we don't do this, then we have to re-evaluate our partnership."

Sekine: Yes, the big orders we are working toward are big companies that have tried to utilize the laser process. They have been using so-called die cutting and now they want to use laser cutting. They are asking us to come up with the best solution to utilize the laser, which means our application engineers need to work hard to come up with those recommendations. They know we are not a laser manufacturer—we cannot create the laser source to meet their requirement—but they are hoping we can select good laser sources.

Once we select these sources, we can mount the laser source to our machine and then integrate it as a LAM system. The first two machines we need to make here in the U.S. Once we get those big contracts we need to start making parts in Asia. Then, with key things like laser sources, optics, software, or the controller portion, we’ll just assemble them together.

Matties: What sort of configuration are your machines? Are they a single head or multiple heads?

Sekine: At the present time, the base machine is a two-beam machine. Are we going to go with more beams in the future? I don't know yet. Maybe. For now, there are two beams with UV/CO₂, or two beams with any kind of laser sources. If the customer feels they can utilize green to their material much better, then we can go with IR and green. With the design we're making right now, we can do any combination.

Matties: In this whole endeavor, what do you think is the greatest challenge?Page 2 of 3

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