DoubleStar takes on a newchallenge with ESPRIT®
In 1978, Jack and Teresa Starnes
began selling AR-15 parts outof their home in Winchester,
Kentucky, under the name of J&T
Distributing. The couple went on
the road selling firearm parts andaccessories at gun shows, and as
they did so, the company grew. In
1999, they began DoubleStar, thefirearm manufacturing division of
their enterprise, and since then,both entities have grown into a
manufacturing powerhouse witha 65,000-square-foot facility,
still located in Winchester, KY.

In addition to producing a small lineof rifles and pistols, DoubleStar’smachine shop manufactures
firearm parts and accessories —including muzzle devices, butt
stocks and receiver blocks — onseven Haas vertical and horizontal
mills and drill-tap machines, a
Doosan vertical, three Haas andDoosan turning centers, and two
Tsugami Swiss-turn machines
The company is continuing togrow and diversify its productportfolio, but it was DoubleStar’s
recent expansion into knives

and other edged weapons that
presented the biggest challenge
for the DoubleStar machine
shop’s team of seven.
Machining a blade with high impacttoughness and resistance toshock load, as well as the ability
to hack through a car’s A-pillar(as the company’s Wrath steel
tomahawk can purportedly do),requires extreme attention to detailand precision. ESPRIT® played
an integral role in DoubleStar’s
successful expansion into theknife business by facilitating theprecise machining necessary tocraft such a complex surface.

DoubleStar butt plates being machined

When CNC programmer Tom
Vagasky first learned ESPRIT®
seven years ago, the system’sease of use made the switch1

“Any time we’ve taken an
old product and redone itin ESPRIT®, our efficiency
has totally increased.”-- Tom Vagasky
CNC programmer

from another system a simple
one. “Because of my backgroundworking with different programming
systems, I was able to very easily
jump into ESPRIT®,” he said. “It
didn’t take me any time at all tolearn it and go.” But machining
a knife blade is a more complex
job than manufacturing, say,a buttstock. The head of the
Wrath tomahawk has six distinct
surfaces, each of which bevels
so subtly into the next that thesurfaces nearly blend together.
“That’s not something you could
manually program,” Vagasky says.

model and understanding 3D
milling strategies, including how
to extend a surface to get thesharp edges of the knives.
DoubleStar now produces fivemodels of knives, machetes andtomahawks, and the plan is tofurther grow the company’s edged
weapons offering. Meanwhile,
the machine shop is continuing
to expand manufacturing on thefirearms accessories side. In order
to exercise greater control overcosts and quality, DoubleStar has
begun bringing the production ofmany parts, including buttstockcomponents, in house. Due tothe complex, multi-sided natureof many of these parts, using
any CAM system other thanESPRIT® wouldn’t have beenan option. “Without ESPRIT®,

we would not have been able tobring a lot of these parts backunder our roof. I wouldn’t haveeven thought of doing it withoutESPRIT®,” Vagasky says.
As the company continues togrow, one thing is clear: ESPRIT
will continue to be DoubleStar’s
greatest asset when it comesto precision and productivity.
“Any time we’ve taken an oldproduct and redone it in ESPRIT®,
our efficiency has totally increased,”
Vagasky says. “When my foreman’sout on the floor and he sees
something that needs to bechanged to make it better, I canpull it up on the screen and makethe change. And boom — we’reback to running it in a better way.”

Vagasky contacted an ESPRIT®
application engineer for advice.
“The AEs at ESPRIT® werevery, very, very helpful in mygetting up and going on thefirst couple of knives,” Vagasky
says. Then, to augment theremote technical support hereceived, Vagasky attended
personalized ESPRIT® training atDP Technology’s office in Chicago.
“It was overwhelming,” he says.
“I know ESPRIT®, but there wasso much more functionality wedidn’t know existed before.”
Vagasky came away from his
training knowing how to create
features directly from the solid

DP Technology Corp.
1150 Avenida Acaso
Camarillo, CA
93012 USA
Tel: + 1 800 627 8479
Outside the US: + 1 805 388 6000
Email: esprit@dptechnology.com

DoubleStar CNC programmer Tom Vagasky

2Copyright © 2017 DP Technology Corp.
All rights reserved.
ESPRIT is a registered trademark ofDP Technology Corp.