Coolman, since 2007. Nineteen years of cuts that taught us how to build the blade.

Alan had been selling other companies' blades since 1998. He had watched the same three things go wrong on site, again and again. Price as the proxy for value. Dealers who had never held a blade. Imported blades that performed in Japan and failed in Selangor.

In 2007, he stopped explaining other people's blades and started making his own. Coolman is the result.

A contractor in Shah Alam called at 11pm. The blade we'd sold him that morning had not made it through the second pile. Alan drove out. He watched the cut. The aggregate was sharper than the spec had predicted. The bond was wrong.

The blade was redesigned over the next four weeks. The new formulation, sandwich cobalt, became what the CM-X line is built on today. The workshop became a manufacturer the day Alan accepted that the contractor was right and the spec sheet was wrong. (Year TBC. Alan to supply.)

In 2014 Coolman signed the exclusive Malaysian distribution agreement for Shibuya core drills. It has been renewed every year since. The same machines, built in Japan, supported by a Malaysian engineering team that has seen the cuts they actually do.

Shibuya makes the drill. Coolman makes sure the drill is the right answer to the cut in front of you.

In one production batch, the wrong bonding agent was used. The blades passed factory test. They failed on site. We recalled every unit, replaced every one, and wrote off the cost.

What we kept was the customer base. Not one Brotherhood dealer left. The contractors who got the failed blade got the replacement, the apology, and a free second blade. Most of them are still with us. Business isn't a race for who can grow fastest. It's a question of who can endure longest.

The same company. Larger inventory. More Field Notes in the archive. The same direct line to engineering. The same answer when a contractor calls at 11pm.

Coolman is built to outlast its founder. That is the only metric of success we trust.