Cryogenic Treatment Results: What Customers Measured
We have been treating tooling since 1980. Over that time customers have run their own before-and-after tests — on their own parts, on their own machines — and written to tell us what they found. These are those letters.
How to read this page
We did not run these tests. Every number below was measured and reported by the customer, on production work, using their own counting methods. We treated the parts and they told us what happened.
Three things worth saying before you read them.
The dates are real and we have left them on. These letters run from 1984 to 2008. Some of the companies have since been acquired or closed. We are not presenting decades-old results as if they arrived last week — we are presenting them as a record that goes back far enough to mean something.
The modest results are here too. One customer measured a 45% improvement. Another measured eight times. Both are on this page. A results page that only shows the spectacular numbers is a sales brochure; the spread is the honest part, and it is also the useful part, because it tells you the answer depends on the tool, the material, and what was failing in the first place.
None of this is a guarantee for your part. What a cryogenic cycle can do depends on the alloy, the prior heat treat, and the failure mode you are actually fighting. If your tools are failing by chipping rather than wear, or the heat treat was wrong to begin with, cryogenic treatment addresses a different problem than the one you have. We would rather tell you that up front.
The letters
D2 granulator knives · three Nelmor machines · rigid vinyl filled with 10 parts per hundred titanium dioxide
“Not only do we get four times more service from the treated knives between regrinds but in addition the material lost from the knife during grinding is reduced by a factor of two. Regrind costs are cut to one fourth and the expense of replacement knives is cut to one eighth of what we experienced with untreated knives.”
— John Stewart, Plant Engineer
Granulator knives · Conair G1420-1 grinder · granulating crystal styrene
“Prior to cryogenic treatment, these knives required resharpening every four weeks. The treated knives have been in service for nearly one year now and have not required resharpening. This represents a ten-fold increase in life so far and the knives are still sharp. I’ll let you know when they finally go dull.”
— Comet Products, Inc., Chelmsford, Massachusetts
3/32″ high-speed steel drills · drilling 13/16″ OD 316 stainless tubing, .070″ wall · 41 through-holes per tube
“I have recently completed a life test comparing 3/32″ H.S. Cleveland drills that have been treated by CTP Cryogenics with identical untreated drills… The deep cryogenically treated drills dramatically out performed the untreated drills.”
— Tyson H. Brady, Owner
Aircraft parts · M42 staggered-tooth milling cutters in .347 stainless · cobalt stagger-tooth cutters in AMS-5759 cobalt alloy
“The Cryogenic Process by CTP Cryogenics, Inc. has given us extended tool life on milling cutters and cutoff tools.”
— Theodore Boryczki, Chief Engineer
Rotary dies · worst-performing die in the plant, chosen deliberately as the test case
“I took our worst case die, had it treated, then sharpened. We then put it into testing and we increased the die’s life four (4) times… The process was very successful in our case and will be used on all rotary dies — new and old.”
— Richard Meyer, Manufacturing Engineer
Missile Systems Division, Andover, Massachusetts · helicoil power mandrels
“Per our telephone conversation, I’m sending you the results of my helicoil power mandrel tests. As a result of these tests, all our power mandrels now call for cryogenic treatment.”
— Lou Buyck, Fabrication, Industrial Engineering Department
Systems Division, Maremont Corporation, Saco, Maine · a production broach
Reported in an internal engineering memo following the trial, which went on to recommend sending the plant’s entire broach inventory for treatment.
— Saco Defense, inter-office correspondence, 23 January 1984
What this record does and does not show
What it shows: across four decades, in shops running very different work — stainless tubing, cobalt aerospace alloys, abrasive filled vinyl, rotary dies, broaches, defense tooling — customers who measured before and after found longer tool life, and enough of them found it that they changed their standard practice afterwards. Several moved their whole tool crib onto the process. One wrote it into a specification.
What it does not show: a number you can expect. The range on this page runs from under one and a half times to ten times, and that spread is the point. A drill in stainless and a granulator knife in filled vinyl are failing for different reasons, and cryogenic treatment helps each one by a different amount.
If you want to know what it would do for your part, the honest answer is that we do not know either until it is measured. That is why the customers above ran trials rather than taking anyone’s word for it — and it is still the right way to start. For what drives the outcome, see the cryogenic heat treatment process, step by step and what you are actually buying. And for the rarest form of this evidence — a customer who adopted the process, removed it, and measured what happened — see does cryogenic treatment actually save money.
Run your own test
Send one tool. Measure it the way these customers did — parts between regrinds, holes per drill, weeks between sharpenings — and compare it against an untreated one doing the same job.
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