Platinum Tooling, the exclusive importer of Heimatec live tools and angle heads, as well as other globally recognised brands of precision machine tool accessories, is pleased to announce three personnel changes: Luke Hansen has been appointed vice president, Frank Twomey has been named director of sales – North America and Ethan Kim has been appointed applications engineer.
Luke Hansen joined Platinum Tooling in October 2017 as a technical sales specialist and has spent the past nine years working closely with his father, company founder and president Preben Hansen, to develop his extensive knowledge of the machine tool accessory market. During this time, he has built strong relationships with international suppliers and key industry partners, while strengthening connections across the Platinum Tooling North American sales network. He will now assume the role of vice president, bringing his industry experience, established relationships and fourth-generation manufacturing background to assist the company’s continuing growth.
Frank Twomey’s appointment as director of sales – North America represents an expansion of his sales leadership responsibilities at Platinum Tooling. Building on his success in strengthening customer relationships, developing market opportunities and driving sales growth throughout the Eastern United States during the last three years, he will now oversee sales operations across the United States, Canada and Mexico. In this role, he will provide strategic direction to the regional sales teams and independent manufacturers’ representatives, leveraging his industry experience and customer-focused approach to support the company’s growth.
In his new role, Ethan Kim will review customer applications and recommend the tools best suited to each customer’s needs. He has strong communication skills and prior experience as an applications engineer and has participated in numerous sales workshops. Although he is relatively new to the machine tool industry, he has a foundation in CNC programming and part design that he looks forward to expanding in his new role.
Before joining Platinum Tooling, Mr Kim served as a product applications engineer at Smalley in Lake Zurich, Illinois, where he provided technical support and guidance to customers and collaborated with sales, engineering, quality, estimating and manufacturing teams to develop solutions for product and application challenges. His experience spans multiple industries, with a primary focus on aerospace and automotive.
Since joining Platinum Tooling, he has worked on a variety of applications and projects and attended IMTS as an exhibitor. With a strong interest in manufacturing, particularly CNC machining, he looks forward to seeing how the company’s tools are applied in real-world projects and seeing the results of his work firsthand. He also values the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with the Platinum Tooling team.
Company president Preben Hansen said: “These developments represent our response to the growth at the company. The addition of application engineering to our team is particularly exciting for us, as we develop our private label brand of custom-built, application-specific tooling to meet customer needs. Moving forward at Platinum Tooling, we anticipate continued expansion in our product lines, talented personnel and facilities.”