Cutting Tool Manufacturing: Drills to ABB Robots

Every machined part in a car, a jet engine or a phone starts with a cutting tool, and somebody has to make those tools first. Cutting tool manufacturing turns steel and tungsten carbide into twist drills, end mills and the small indexable inserts that clamp into milling cutters and lathe holders. This post traces how that work moved from grinding wheels in New England workshops to CNC tool grinders, looks at what tool makers are dealing with in 2026, and sets out where ABB robots already fit in the plant and where they could fit next.

Three milling cutters with indexable carbide inserts clamped around their heads. Photo: Julius Schroeder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How drills and cutters were ground by hand

For most of the nineteenth century a drill was a flat spade of forged steel, shaped and sharpened by a smith or machinist on a grindstone. The helical twist drill that clears its own chips came from Stephen A. Morse, who patented it in 1863 and set up the Morse Twist Drill and Machine Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Making the spiral flutes took skilled milling and hand finishing, and every resharpening depended on the eye of the person at the wheel. Shops kept a toolroom just for this.

A Morse taper twist drill, the helical drill form Stephen A. Morse patented in 1863. Photo: Emrys2 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The steel itself improved long before the grinding did. Around 1900 Frederick Winslow Taylor and Maunsel White showed high speed steel at the Paris Exposition, tool steel that kept its edge while glowing hot and let lathes cut much faster. In the 1920s Krupp began selling cemented tungsten carbide under the Widia name, short for the German phrase meaning like diamond. Carbide was far harder than steel, so it was first brazed onto steel shanks as small tips. Later it was pressed into loose inserts that a machinist could turn or throw away.

Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911, who developed high speed steel with Maunsel White. Photo: Rumely Company via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Grinding stayed manual for decades. In August 1942 a government photographer pictured a young woman at a midwest drill and tool plant working at a grinding machine, guiding the work by hand. Tool and cutter grinders gained indexing heads and fixtures, but an operator still set every angle. The big change came with computer control. ANCA, founded in Melbourne in 1974, was among the companies that built CNC tool grinders able to produce a whole end mill from a plain carbide rod in one clamping.

A young woman works at a grinder in a midwest drill and tool plant, August 1942. Photo: Ann Rosener / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Insert presses, tool grinders and robot loaders today

A modern tool plant has two quite different lines. Solid tools such as drills and end mills are ground from carbide rods on five axis CNC grinders, and grinder builders now offer robot loaders that feed blanks from pallets so a machine can run through the night. The ANCA MX7 is one example, sold with automatic tool loading and a wheel pack changer so it can switch between tool types without an operator. Inserts start as carbide powder mixed with cobalt, pressed into shape, sintered in furnaces and then coated. In October Sandvik Coromant launched two new milling grades, GC4330 and GC4340, with a new substrate and its Inveio coating, replacing the older GC4230 and GC4240.

An ANCA MX7 CNC tool and cutter grinder with automatic tool loading. Photo: Prbocchi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Demand has been strong this year. The US Cutting Tool Institute and AMT reported that American cutting tool shipments reached $278.1 million in July 2026, up 29 percent on July 2025, and a 22 October report said the growth continued through August. USCTI's president linked much of the rise to sharply higher raw material prices. That squeezes tool makers on cost, and it is one reason they want lights out grinding and fewer scrapped blanks. A CNC machine tending robot is often the first automation step in such a plant.

A face mill fitted with carbide tipped inserts at a small workshop in Fryšták, Czech Republic. Photo: Pavel Ševela / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Loading is where ABB robots fit most easily. A compact IRB 1200, renewed in 2025, can pick drill blanks from a tray and place them in a grinder collet, and a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can do the same next to an operator without a full fence. Insert lines handle thousands of small parts, so a fast IRB 360 FlexPicker with PickMaster vision could sort pressed or finished inserts onto trays. These are possible fits based on what the robots do elsewhere; we found no public ABB project in a carbide tool plant.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, launched in 2025, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

Where cutting tool plants are heading

Today a blank may be ground on one machine, measured on another and laser marked on a third, with people carrying trays between them. The likely next step is to link those machines with robot arms and autonomous mobile robots such as ABB's Flexley Mover, so that one cell grinds, checks, marks and packs a tool. Cells like this are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, where an engineer can check reach into a grinder door before anything is bolted down.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Regrinding could use robots too. Worn drills and end mills come back from customers in mixed sizes and states, and someone has to sort them, measure the wear and decide which can be reground. Vision guided robots could take on the sorting and loading, while the grinder handles the new edge. The same skills carry over from robotic grinding and deburring, where force control helps a robot hold a part against a wheel with a steady pressure.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed, the kind of picker that could sort inserts. Photo: ABB

Carbide dust from grinding is a health hazard, so cells need enclosure and extraction whether a person or a robot loads them, and the robot itself needs covers and seals against the grinding oil mist. Tungsten and cobalt prices swing, which makes the payback of a robot cell harder to predict. Small tool shops run many sizes in small batches, so changeover has to be quick and the programming simple. Skilled grinder operators will still be needed, though more of their day will go into setting up programs, checking geometry and looking after several automated machines at once.

Two tungsten carbide knife blanks, the costly material at the heart of modern tools. Photo: Jacek Halicki / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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