Introducing the Technical Advisor’s Monumental Award
We received a certificate and an extra prize from Mr. Shoichiro Toyoda, Chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation, for winning the 1995 Medium and Small Business New Machine Development Award.
This was in recognition of our development of an ultrasonic microdeburring cleaner.
This was the beginning of the challenge of ultrasonic deburring technology. The basic technology was completed, but the first step was the removal of whisker burrs.
There were almost no products on the market, except for university laboratories,that were processed with only whisker burrs.
As soon as we made the announcement, we received many requests for deburring samples, most of which would be unthinkable today.
Most of them were from major Japanese companies.
The burrs were 5mm thick at the base! It was difficult to remove with a file.
The thinnest part of the polycarbonate was nearly 2 mm thick.
It was a pile of defective products that were difficult to reprocess, simply due to some processing error.
At this point, I decided that it was still too early for the deburring market in Japan and withdrew from the business.
A few years after that, we publicized the product to our customers and collected samples with some trepidation.
We also received many requests for deburring.
What surprised me was that there were no defective products that I had previously thought were a joke, but rather minute burrs that clearly showed that the customer had considered various deburring methods and had sent the samples with high hopes for ultrasonic deburring.
So we decided to focus on ultrasonic deburring once again.