Success Story | First Gear

First Gear is a family-owned, precision gear and spline manufacturer in Northeast Indiana just outside of Fort Wayne. First Gear started in 1997 and began producing precision gears for Indy-Car racing teams. As their business grew it opened the door for prototype and production machining in tight tolerance industries such as aerospace, defense/military, space exploration, medical, food processing, industrial and many more.

In 2022, they purchased their first Swiss machine. Swiss CAM software was an idea at the time until they had the variation of jobs that would avoid the traditional method of hand programming and spindle synchronization. It came down to the 2 leading solutions on the market, ESPRIT and PartMaker. Here at PMT, we were able to pitch both products due to our sister company, NexGenSolutions, offering Autodesk products. As PMT built the partnership with First Gear, the winter of 2023 was the time when the need for CAM software had its greatest ROI. Both products were evaluated, ESPRIT was the best solution due to long term consolidation for other machining applications (wire, turnmill, and milling).

First Gear easily jumped into the new platform, ESPRIT EDGE, to progress their CAM programming ability. “ESPRIT is so easy to learn, especially how PMT provides all the resources from 1:1 support to their ESPRIT training options”, said Founder & Owner Greg Leffler. Since adding ESPRIT, First Gear continues to see ESPRIT perform well with their latest additions of several, brand new turnmill machines: Okuma LB3000 MYW, LB4000 MY and DMG Mori NLX2500SY. First Gear is the company you can trust for your precision gear and spline manufacturing from one piece to several hundred thousand.