Meeting customer demand for high-performance holemaking solutions

Harvey Performance Co., parent company of Harvey Tool, Helical Solutions, and other cutting tool brands, has focused on bringing to market solutions that its customers want and need. Staying true to this mission, the company, which predominantly offers milling and turning product lines, recently launched its Valor Holemaking line of American-made, high-performance drilling and holemaking offerings for CNC machinists.

“We’re winning at the spindle across all these applications, but were walking by noticeable and sizable holemaking opportunities and really didn’t have that comparable product offering,” says Harvey Performance Co. CEO Brian Lavelle. “The customers wanted that same performance from us across holemaking. We had a lot of knowledge in-house and felt like bringing that knowledge together under our own brand, Valor Holemaking.”

The product line represents the company’s first complete brand launch, which Lavelle calls a new and different undertaking.

“This was the first time we’ve launched a brand from scratch,” he says. “Conversations were happening back in 2020 as far as what the market needed, getting our basic plans in place, and we started to design the tools shortly thereafter.”

Valor Holemaking’s product line is engineered and manufactured entirely in Harvey Performance’s Gorham, Maine manufacturing facility, where its premium line of Helical Solutions end mills are also made. The facility, which was built in 2020, integrated additional equipment and technology to launch the Valor Holemaking brand.

“We were having conversations with our distribution partners, with our end user customers, making sure we understood what materials were being used, how the drills were being applied, and then the line was purpose-built around the needs of the market,” Lavelle says. “There was a lot of in-house testing and consultation with customers and our own application engineers to make sure the results we were seeing, the performance and the quality of the holes, was what the market needed.”

The resulting Valor Holemaking brand aims to deliver hole accuracy and repeatability, high-quality surface finish, optimal tool life and performance, and a desirable cost-per-hole.

“We’re focusing on the holes and ensuring they have the right circularity, the right straightness, and the right hole quality,” Lavelle says. “It’s about delivering the performance that it needs to get to the right cost per hole, and then it’s ultimately to deliver value for the end user.”

About the author: Melissa Schiller is senior editor with Aerospace Manufacturing and Design.