Gleason Corporation introduced Coniflex Plus, a high-speed dry cutting tool system for manufacturing straight bevel gears. According to Gleason, it is the first peripheral stick blade cutting tool system with positive blade seating, which results in cutting time reductions with improvements to gear quality and gear rolling characteristics.

Straight bevel gears are increasingly popular for use in certain applications, but prior to a Gleason's six-axis machining process, there was no other machinery for cutting or grinding them. The process, released in 2006, was wet cutting and used traditional high speed steel cutting tools.

The Coniflex Plus system allows use of coated carbide cutting tools in a dry cutting environment. Coniflex Plus is up to three times faster than its predecessor, avoids the use of cutting fluids and consumes 25 percent of the energy that traditional straight bevel gear cutting took.

The geometry of existing straight bevel gear designs will be duplicated using the Coniflex Plus cutter system. The free design of profile curvature, dish angle edge radius and blade point provide added freedoms for strength and noise optimizations. The Pentac stick blades are used in the Coniflex Plus cutter heads, and they can be sharpened on existing standard Gleason stick blade sharpening machines without additional software or fixtures.