Australian Manufacturer Finds its Niche in Equine Dental Products – Who Knew?
Through circumstance, The Edge Equine, located in Australia, has become an expert producer in horse dentistry. And business is good. In fact, growth in the animal health industry led the company to invest in an ANCA FX5E Grinder to keep up with demand.
The Edge Equine manufactures products used by vets to help with a horse's dental health.
Based in Bendigo, Victoria, The Edge Equine is an Australian manufacturer of equine dental products, primarily rasps for manual horse dentistry. The company also provides commercial industrial sharpening services for the central Victorian region -- specializing in high precision sharpening such as broach drills, annular cutters, saw blades, and router bits for local commercial cabinet makers, sawmills, and food processors.
VIDEO: Australian company The Edge Equine manufactures equine dental products with ANCA's FX grinding machines.
The company's focus on manufacturing equine dental products stemmed from a local horse dentist's request to sharpen his equine dental blades. Today, it is a point of differentiation as The Edge Equine has concentrated on a more traditional product while other manufacturers have moved to the electronics industry.
The Edge Equine ships horse dentistry products to 40 different countries.
The Edge Equine pride themselves on providing prompt service, made possible with on-site manufacturing capabilities that enable them to ship products within 48 hours. The company sells directly to over 40 countries, with distributors in the US, UK, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Tim McMahon, Managing Director of The Edge Equine said, "Our relationship with ANCA started in 2005 when we purchased a second-hand TG4. Over the years we grew to have three TG4s on the floor. ANCA were fantastic, they helped us write our programs, get the machines up and going and then when we swapped to our first FX3, ANCA developed the programs to make our products which was absolutely fantastic."
"We invested in the FX5E in 2020. We were after another machine, as our demand for product had grown to the point where the FX3 and the remaining TG4 couldn't cope. Jake [Farragher], ANCA Asia-Pacific General Manager recommended the new FX5E as having some features that would certainly help us grow, part of that being its future ability to be automated as our growth continued. It's been a pretty seamless transition with having the FX3 and FX5E on the floor."
An operator at The Edge Equine observes the grinding process in the FX5E.
The Edge Equine mainly produce dental rasps and floats, devices that are used for maintenance of horses' teeth. "The average cycle time is approximately 14 to 16 minutes depending on the rasp profile that we're grinding which is two blades per cycle so it's roughly eight minutes, seven to eight minutes per blade," said McMahon. "Most of our clients around the world order on an as needs basis so a prompt manufacture and supply is important to us and our customers."
Bright Future
"With the implementation of the FX5E, it has given us new scope to look at more high precision grinding in the industrial regrinding market," said McMahon. "We do a lot of granular cutters, annular cutters or broach cutters. We're also looking at new products once again in the veterinary space. So, there's a lot of growth in using the capabilities of the FX5E.
Close-up of a completed rasp that is used in horse dentistry.
"The FX5E has the capacity to have robotics fitted and it will be something to look at in the future as our market grows and with the help of ANCA, we'll develop a process to automate the process of blades. At the moment, we manually feed the machines, which still works well for us, but we have the opportunity to grow further on the automation stage."
The other major benefit of the FX5E is its flexibility. It gives the company the capacity to change from manufacturing rasps through to grinding tools within a matter of minutes. As with the FX3, they do jig setups, change things over, and change wheels. It becomes time-consuming. But the flexibility they have now is outstanding. They can go from one job to the next without losing any time.
"The FX5E is probably the first opportunity where we've had the capacity and the wherefore to branch out into different products and it's also given us a lot more flexibility of sharpening our own mills within our own processing," added McMahon.
In addition to the equine products, ANCA CNC grinders are used for manufacturing precision cutting tools and components across a diverse range of competitive industries.
McMahon is confident that the company will see continual growth in the animal health industry, enabling The Edge Equine to be a leader in the manufacture of manual tools for equine dentistry. He envisions using the FX5E along with ANCA's technology to manufacture other products within the veterinary space in the next 10 to 15 years.
"Prior to COVID, we would do three or four conferences a year within the USA, at least one in the UK, and Germany. We are and we'll always be looking at what the world needs and what the industry needs as far as these types of tools," he concluded.
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