PCNC Success Stories

Meet John Grimsmo. 28. Canadian. Self-taught metal worker. Up-and-coming artisan in the custom knifemaking industry.

With a 26 year career as a General Machinist at Boeing, Kevin Bethards knows a thing or two about CNC. Owner of a PCNC 770 with a 4th Axis, Bethards has a small home machine shop.

IT Program Manager by day, maker by night, Kent Myers writes extensively about his interests and innovations on his popular blog, KentMyers.net.

With help from his Tormach PCNC 1100, Ken Bricker takes Summit Aerosports to new heights.

After seeing an advertisement for a PCNC 1100 in Livesteam Magazine, Dick Hofsheier of Banks, Oregon scheduled a demonstration with a mill owner registered in the Tormach referral network.

John Saunders and Yanne Root, Tormach PCNC 1100 owners and co-founders of Strikemark, manufacturer of the lightning fast SM-1 auto-reset rifle target, have extended their range with a line of Picatinny rail mounts for the GoPro and Contour camera systems.

In his home machine shop in the mountains of New Mexico, Tormach PCNC 1100 owner Mike Sherick has many projects. From custom musical instruments to personal aircraft and astro-photography, Sherick is currently building a 24” remote control (RC) telescope for his personal observatory.

Submitting a variety photos that showcase the breadth of Joe Theriot’s machining talents, this customer showcase submission comes to us from the bayous of southern Louisiana. Contract welder by trade, Joe uses his PCNC 1100 at Theriot Contracting to fulfill orders ranging from custom pieces to large-scale industrial jobs.

Terry Mayhugh of Round Rock, Texas used his Tormach PCNC 1100 to build a Jerry Howell 4 cylinder twin cam 4-stroke engine—a project two years and approximately 3000 hours in the making.

Derek Lahr is a grad student and senior member of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), a facility for graduate and undergraduate robotics research and education at Virginia Tech. Lahr also owns a Tormach PCNC 1100 mill, using it inside and outside the classroom.

Tormach customer turned Tormach employee, Rory DesJardin was a three-year PCNC 1100 user before he joined Tormach as a Product Developer and Technical Support Specialist in January of this year. DesJardin used his PCNC 1100 to make shifter controllers and shifters for Jeep and Toyota automatic transmissions and Toyota transfer cases as a side business.

Mechanical engineer by trade, Max Jensen used his personal PCNC 1100 to make a custom license plate bracket for a Suzuki GSXR600 motorcycle.

Engineers at Desert Star Systems in California used a PCNC 1100 with ATC and 4^th Axis to machine molds for the flipper tag project—a solar-powered radio tag worn on the flippers of sea otters. Flipper tags are used by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to monitor the behavior of sea otters and collect data about the animals’ behavior.

Excerpt from September 2007 Blade Magazine article: Personal CNC: The Future of Knifemaking? -

When Steve Woods is not running his 75-employee Dallas-based catalog photography company, Steven Michael Studios, he is in the shop making his own custom knives, sold through his second business, Rock River Iron, LLC (www.rockriveriron.com).

Excerpt from September 2007 Blade Magazine article: Personal CNC: The Future of Knifemaking? -

Steve Hulett has been making his own knives for 15 years, which he sells in his own retail craft shop Seldom Seen Knives (seldomseenknives.com), located a few blocks from Yellowstone National Park. “I only have so much time because I also have to run the store,” says Hulett. “I have been probably making 40 to 50 knives a year.”

Excerpt from September 2007 Blade Magazine article: Personal CNC: The Future of Knifemaking? -

Randy Williams of Arlington, Washington is by no means a novice when it comes to CNC. A CNC machinist for the past thirty years, he’s worked many industrial-grade machines. Recently he turned his knife-making hobby into a fulltime job. “The way I design knives is the CNC way – I never did do this with belt sanders and drill presses. I was never a hand-craftsman. All my designs came from the computer.”

Excerpt from September 2007 Blade Magazine article: Personal CNC: The Future of Knifemaking? -

Craig Sword founded MIL-TAC Knives and Tools (www.mil-tac.com) in Wylie, Texas in 2005. MIL-TAC focuses on manufacturing affordable knives and tools for the harsh environments that the military and law enforcement personnel face on a daily basis.