Helical tools

Berkshire Partners invests from $150 million to $500 million of equity capital in mid-sized companies that are valued from $200 million to $2 billion and that operate in the consumer, healthcare, services, industrial, and technology & communications sectors. Berkshire Partners was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Boston.

“We are excited for the many growth opportunities enabled by the combination of Harvey Performance and ATA’s highly complementary offerings and talented leadership teams,” said Ted Rainaud, a managing director at Berkshire Partners. “This acquisition represents a significant expansion of Harvey Performance’s product offering and geographic presence. We look forward to supporting the continued growth and expansion of the combined business.”

Harvey’s acquisition of ATA provides the business with an international platform for continued growth and expansion and gives the company’s North American customers access to European industrial cutting tools, while allowing for expansion of Harvey Performance’s brands across Europe. The global cutting tool market is estimated to be over $20 billion. With increasing demand for precision machining across industries like aerospace, automotive, and electronics, the market is expected to see continued growth.

Harvey Performance Company designs and manufactures specialized cutting tools used to cut and shape metals in precision machining applications. Customers of the company are active in the aerospace and defense, medical, automotive, industrial motors and telecommunications sectors. Harvey’s brands include Harvey Tool, Helical Solutions, Micro 100, Titan USA, CoreHog, and Valor Holemaking brands.

Company owned brands include Karnasch, SGSPRO, ATA Tools, Van Hoorn Carbide, Industrial Tooling Corporation, and Garryson. ATA’s 2024 revenue is estimated to be €110 million in 2024 with an EBITDA of €23.5 million, a 21.4% EBITDA margin.

Kennametal

Harvey Performance Company, a provider of carbide end mills and cutting tools and a portfolio company of Berkshire Partners, has acquired ATA Group.

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ATA Group manufactures and distributes over 25,000 SKUs of industrial cutting tools to more than 7,500 customers in 90 countries that operate in the aerospace, automotive, power generation, transportation, energy, metal fabrication, marine and foundry sectors.

Some tungsten carbide ball sizes are Hot Isocratic Pressed or hipped. The newest procedure is to Sinter-HIP the parts in a single operation. The metallurgically complete ball blanks are then rough ground with course diamond to remove all imperfections from the surface. Using micro size diamond dust, they are then finished lapped and polished to final size and microinch roundness with a sub-microinch surface finish.

There has been a tremendous consolidation within the hard metals industry. The surviving entities have become very large companies that are far less willing to produce any special combinations of material orders. This has dramatically reduced the availability of special grades of cemented tungsten carbide. Many of the exotic grades are simply not available today. Delivery on available grades is in the eight to sixteen week time frame.

It has good corrosive resistance in many environments. The material has a very low rate of thermal expansion, at 2.5 microinches per-inch per-degree Fahrenheit (4.9 X 10^-6 per degree C). Steel is 6.4 and aluminum is 12 microinches per-inch per-degree Fahrenheit. One of the very important features of this material is that it is electrically conductive, with a resistivity of two micro-ohms per centimeter. This conductivity sets it apart from other hard stiff materials, such as ceramics and sapphire, because it allows it to be machined into complex forms by the electrical discharge machining (EDM) process. Cemented Tungsten Carbide can be ground and lapped using diamond grit. The material is slightly magnetic due to the binder used, typically nickel or cobalt. Small diameter balls can be picked up with a magnet. Cemented Tungsten Carbide is very heavy, with a density of .54 pounds per cubic inch or 15 grams per cubic centimeter. Cemented Tungsten Carbide is neither a metal nor is it a ceramic. It is a cermetal, although this isn't a widely used term. This is a combination of a large percentage of Tungsten Carbide ceramic particles bonded together by a small percentage of a metallic binder, to form a solid mass.

Killygarry, Ireland-headquartered ATA, led by CEO Peter Cosgrove with more than 450 employees, was founded in 1963 and has seven manufacturing facilities worldwide with operations in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland.

ValorDrilling

Berkshire Partners acquired a majority stake in Harvey in November 2021 from Summit Partners which had acquired the business in October 2017 from The Riverside Company.

Harvey Tool

Piper Sandler was the financial advisor to Harvey Performance Company and Berkshire Partners on the acquisition of ATA. Houlihan Lokey was the advisor to ATA.

The Tungsten carbide powder and powdered cobalt metal are mechanically mixed to form a uniform combination. To this combination is added a polymer or wax that acts as a mechanical binder in the pre-sintered stage. A carefully measured volume of this combined powder is compressed by a double acting press to form the tungsten carbide ball blank, or pre-form. The binder is removed by placing the preformed parts in a vacuum chamber and raising the temperature. The binder out gasses and is trapped down stream as a liquid. Next, the combined tungsten carbide and cobalt pre-forms are sintered or fused into a solid mass by heating them to a high temperature in a vacuum or hydrogen atmosphere furnace.

Harvey, led by CEO Brian Lavelle, was founded in 1985 and is headquartered north of Boston in Rowley, Massachusetts. “We couldn’t be more excited about welcoming ATA to the Harvey Performance family,” said Mr. Lavelle. “This acquisition represents a milestone in the proud history of the company and further establishes our integrated, international business comprised of distinctive brands and product lines.”

ATA is a portfolio company of Dublin-headquartered Development Capital and the sovereign wealth fund Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF). Development Capital first invested in ATA Group in 2017 and ISIF invested in the business in 2019 to back the acquisition of Karnasch Professional Tools, a German cutting tool specialist. With the sale to Harvey, both Development Capital and ISIF are exiting their investment in ATA.

Cemented Tungsten Carbide is an incredible material. It was originally developed for use as a cutting tool in machine tool applications where it still finds wide use today. It is extremely hard at 91 HRA which is equivalent to 1500 Vickers 30. This material is very wear resistant, with some abrasion tests showing it at 30 times hard steel. It has good long-term dimensional stability which makes a good material for gage applications. Cemented Tungsten Carbide is extremely stiff, with a Young's modulus of elasticity of 98,000,000 pounds per square inch, compared with steel at 30,000,000 PSI. This high stiffness makes cemented tungsten carbide balls a good choice for ball-sizing and they provide premier results as components of kinematic couplings. Its good performance at temperatures up to 800 degree Fahrenheit (427° Centigrade) make it a good choice in high temperature applications.

“This acquisition presents great potential for Harvey Performance,” said Jerry Gleisner, Harvey’s senior vice president of sales. “It provides Harvey’s North American customers with exposure to some of the best industrial cutting tools that Europe has to offer.”

Helical

“ATA is delighted to join Harvey Performance Company, with whom we share a unified global vision for the future,” said Mr. Cosgrove. “We’re focused on expanding Harvey Performance’s brands across Europe and beyond while introducing ATA’s leading brands to Harvey Performance’s customers. I am honored to join the Harvey Performance board. Our management team is looking forward to collaborating with our new colleagues, and our primary focus remains on driving business growth globally.”

Making spectrographic chemical analysis of Tungsten Carbide can be difficult and uncertain, so the accepted procedure is to use a magnetic permascopic evaluation. If anyone tells you that they can analyze tungsten carbide to an exact figure, ask them for the error budget on their process. If they know the uncertainty, it will be in percentage points. The same exactness of chemistry and physical properties in tungsten carbide that are experienced with alloy metals cannot be expected, as T.C. is made from a physical mixture of a pure metal powder and a powdered ceramic. There will naturally be more variability in performance. The stiffness or Young's modulus of elasticity given for Tungsten Carbide has been measured in tension, but balls are almost always used in compression. In our experience, the Young's modulus of elasticity of cemented tungsten carbide is actually 10% higher in compression than it is in tension.

When a mixture of powdered tungsten metal and carbon powder are raised to a very high temperature by an arc of electricity, while the whole mass is held in a carbon crucible, there is a complete chemical combination of the two elements to form a big lump of tungsten carbide ( WC ). This lump is crushed several times and then milled to form a fine powder. The powder is screened down to uniform particle sizes.