Kay Engineering's Gundrilling Machine Performs Range of Operations

Kays Engineering’s DeHoff 20144 is a custom gundrilling machine designed and manufactured in Marshall, Missouri. According to the company, the DeHoff 20144 is used to make components for the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor, the ITER Tokamak. Fusion reactors use extreme heat to fuse atoms together and create massive amounts of energy, while also not generating radioactive waste, CO₂ nor greenhouse gas emissions.

The DeHoff 20144 is used to perform gundrilling, pull boring, roller burnishing and thread tapping on aluminum microwave guides. The microwave guides are long tubes used to heat the plasma fluid inside the Tokamak vacuum chamber to 150-million-degrees Celsius — the temperature needed for nuclear fusion.

The DeHoff 20144 has a gundrilling diameter capacity of 2" (50.8 mm) and a maximum drilling depth of 144" (3,658 mm). It features custom workpiece fixturing and tooling to perform the gundrilling, pull boring, roller burnishing and thread tapping operations all on a single machine.