Two Precision Tungsten Carbide Machining Facilities Working Together

On Friday October 1^st, 2021, GLE-Precision President Clint Bucholz, Sales Engineer Ashley Smith, and Shop Supervisor Steve Tagget went to visit Crafts Technology, a precision tungsten carbide machining company acquired by Hyperion Materials & Technologies in April 2021. Both companies are Precision Manufacturing industry leaders in tungsten carbide and other hard materials. Jeff Taylor, Crafts Technology President visited and toured GLE-Precision back in Mid-September right after GLE had been acquired by Hyperion Materials & Technologies. Due to the similar capabilities between the two companies, both visits were to gain insight on the synergies between GLE-Precision and Crafts Technology, further solidifying the Hyperion Family relationship.

Synergy in the Hyperion Family

GLE and Crafts are excited to merge expertise to strengthen & broaden the Hyperion family with the capability to manufacture tungsten carbide precision parts. Both companies have extremely skilled precision machinists and tight tolerance capabilities. Jeff Taylor said during his visit to GLE in September, “GLE’s Lapping capability is remarkable”. While Clint Bucholz said after the visit this past Friday, that “Crafts has an impressive – world class EDM department”. Both companies have similar strengths and capabilities with plans for constant collaboration since both companies cohabitate the same manufacturing space.

Encouraging Best Practices

Hyperion acquired both GLE and Crafts with knowledge that although they are mid-sized companies, they both have large goals to lead the precision manufacturing industry. The entire Hyperion family plans to learn from each other and work towards implementing “best practice policies”.

One of GLE’s “best practice policies” that Hyperion took notice of during their visit to GLE’s facility, was the expectation for a consistent, high quality customer experience, which is utilized daily to build strong and lasting relationships with customers. GLE believes so heavily in a high-quality customer experience there is a rule that the phones absolutely cannot ring more than three times without someone in the office answering. GLE always want their customers speaking to a real person at the office – never to a robot and never sending them to voicemail. Sales Engineer Ashley Smith semi-jokingly told Crafts and Hyperion representatives during their visit to GLE “Oh, we don’t mess around here; I have sprinted to my phone a few times just so it doesn’t ring three times”.

One “best practice policy” that GLE will be adopting from Crafts is their 3D printed packaging solution. Crafts is currently 3D printing highly customized containers to protect precision parts. These individually printed packages have helped Crafts overcome the packaging challenges of cost, availability, and geometric limitations. GLE will be following in Crafts footsteps, and intends to implement this best practice in the next few months, hopefully printing packages by late 2021 or early 2022.