The September Seco News product launch is now behind us and the marketing team is looking forward to another fast ramp up of new product sales. As you know, the featured products in the launch are the new Perfomax® indexable drill and Feedmax^TM –P solid carbide drill. Since the launch I have been asked a number of times why we are introducing new drills when we already have the best or one of the best drills on the market. That is just the reality of the intense competition in the cutting tool world. The primary manufacturers all have good products these days, and we at Seco have to continue to improve the product performance if we want to stay ahead of the pack.

The new Perfomax drill is a perfect example of a new product with a number of relatively small enhancements that take the performance up a notch against our existing product and the competition. We have truly made an excellent drill even better. The key to successful drilling is to be able to evacuate the chips effectively and avoid insert chipping and poor surface finishes due to problems with clearing the chips. The new flute design has been engineered to more effectively evacuate the chips. In addition, we designed a new wave pattern on the drill flutes and laser harden the front of the drill to 60 HRC. Not only does the drill look good and unique, but these design features also reduce the friction between the drill body and the chip. The second significant problem with indexable insert drills is that the chips tend to erode the steel body and eventually either change the chip flow or even worse cause the insert pocket to wear out prematurely. The new wave pattern significantly reduces both these failure mechanisms, and as a result, the new Perfomax drill lasts longer than any drill on the market today.

The new Feedmax drill also has some unique design features that make the most productive solid carbide drill on the market today even better. The stronger straight cutting edge, redesigned coolant holes, narrow land margins and new advanced coating take the performance up a notch for solid carbide drilling. The new Feedmax is not your every day job shop drill. The relatively new Universal drill is the tool for that application area. Feedmax is the tool of choice for high volume applications where optimized performance is important. These design improvements give the opportunity to increase speeds and feeds by up to 35% and not sacrifice any tool life. That is a huge productivity increase.

Sometimes the product launch has ground breaking technology like Duratomic® or Stabilizer™ 2.0 and other times it is a combination of the little things that make our tools better than everything else on the market. Either way, you can improve your position with your customers by showing them how the new products from Seco can improve both productivity and profitability. Check out all the digital assets in the product launch email from Seco or on Showcase where all the product summaries, videos, technical presentations and sales guides are stored. Or, take three minutes and review the product launch summary from Todd Miller.