October 23, 2026

Last month, a long-standing partner—a precision injection mold shop in Stuttgart, Germany—sent us a video from their shop floor. A 5-axis machining center had triggered an emergency stop with a broken tool fragment wedged at the bottom of a hole. The workpiece was a D2 tool steel mold insert valued at tens of thousands of

Last month, a mold shop in Stuttgart sent a scrapped ejector guide pin to our lab. The part was vacuum-hardened AISI D2 tool steel (1.2379) at 62 HRC with an M16×1.5 external thread. The shop tried single-point threading on a lathe. They shattered three coated inserts in a row. After 14 hours of upstream machining,