Maximilian Buss has joined the management of Gentil Hartmetallwerkzeuge GmbH in Germany’s Northern Bavaria. As managing partner, he is responsible for production, personnel and sales. Buss shares the management of the company with Stefan Gentil, son of the company founder, who has held this position since 1997 and is responsible for design and quality management. Wolfgang Sußner, who has been co-managing director for many years, has retired from the management of the company, but will continue to support it in an advisory capacity.
Buss, born in 1988, has been firmly rooted in grinding technology since graduating from high school in 2008. After training as an industrial mechanic specialising in mechanical and plant engineering at Rolls-Royce Germany in Oberursel, he joined Frankfurt-based precision tool grinding company Langnickel und Pohl GmbH in 2011, initially in the manufacture of cutting tools and then as production manager. In 2019, Buss joined Gentil, where he also worked as Production Manager until he joined the management team. At the same time, he completed a degree in economics and business psychology at the FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Frankfurt am Main.
Gentil Hartmetallwerkzeuge, founded in 1982, is an owner-managed manufacturer of customised cutting tools made of solid carbide, HSS, in brazed design, with indexable inserts and combined, for example for drilling, boring, countersinking, reaming, milling and turning. Accordingly, the portfolio ranges from drills and stepped drills, stepped countersinks and stepped reamers to milling cutters, mould milling cutters, mould turning tools and cutting rotors, also designed as indexable insert tools. The medium-sized company also uses the extremely hard and wear-resistant cutting material polycrystalline diamond (PCD), whose main applications are the machining of wood, plastic and non-ferrous metals, in exceptional cases also polycrystalline cubic boron nitride (CBN). The repair and regrinding of tools from own and third-party production complete the range of services.
With the manufacture of precision and wear parts, tools for milling and mixing as well as punching and forming tools, Gentil is currently tapping into other promising sectors. This step is emphasised by the company’s new brand identity under the name Gentil Special Tools and the imminent launch of a completely new website.
Buss: ‘The special tools we manufacture in-house are often the only way to go when it comes to the efficient machining of complex workpiece geometries. From in-depth consultation and design to the manufacture and maintenance of the tools, we realise everything from a single source. This and the high quality of our products form the basis of our often very long customer relationships. I would like to build on this seamlessly. In cooperation with technology leaders such as university institutes, I would also like to utilise pioneering processes such as laser technology or 3D printing, which offer advantages such as even higher machining speeds combined with even longer tool life and resource savings.’