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MICRO TOOLING | CASE STUDY


plant manager at L'Abbaye, one of Audemars Piguet’s four production sites. He is exactly aware of the advantages of KAISER: “Until recently, we used to work with shrinking chucks, which we are currently in the process of replacing with the collet chucks of BIG. The advantages of the Japanese products are obvious: their extremely simple handling. BIG chucks allow employees who don’t work with such tools on a daily basis to clamp the product in a precise and size-adjusted manner. We additionally solved the problem of clamping tools with a small diameter since small shrink chucks have the disadvantage of clamping too rapidly due to their thin walls,” said Rethore.


Using the EWN 04-7 of KAISER — incidentally the smallest precision boring head in the world — Audemars Piguet


manufactures high-precision bores in components for various watch models. "Boring with tolerances of ±0.002 mm / ±0.004 mm therefore no longer poses a problem," said Rethore. In the past, Audemars Piguet used to work with canon drills. However, those tools had the disadvantage of becoming increasingly inaccurate with usage. "Due to our high technical requirements, the ability to adjust the boring head to a thousandth of a millimeter is a great plus,” Christoph Guhl says. “Our production facilities are operating completely at capacity. At this point, we could sell 50% more than we can actually manufacture.”


KAISER Precision Tooling Ltd www.kaisertooling.com


19 | commercial micro manufacturing international Vol 7 No.3


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