Everything is bigger in Texas, and come February 2012, Tomball, TX-based Hole Specialists will be bigger after it moves into a 25,800ft². expansion. In the meantime, however, new customers have pushed the company to put newly acquired machine tools into production well in advance, as word gets around about the company's new capabilities for making larger, deeper, straighter holes in massive industrial components.

"We added several customers per week in October as word spread about our new capabilities, so we have shoehorned our new equipment into our existing plant, added employees, and everyone's pitching in to meet our deadlines," says Larry Robinson, president of Hole Specialists.

As its name implies, Hole Specialists is an elite operation, one of a handful of shops that can produce deep, round, straight holes in heavy industrial components. The company's traditional customers have been high-end offshore drillers, and when government restrictions diminished offshore business, the land drilling sector picked up the slack almost immediately.

"Our offshore business is starting to pick up again, but we have seen a big chunk of new business come from the land drilling sector," Robinson says. "Defense and aerospace have also been strong for us recently."

As part of its $3.5 million expansion, Hole Specialists has added OD/ID turning and pull boring to its list of core capabilities that includes: CNC gun drilling, deep hole drilling, reaming, counter rotating and various honing services. The company has increased its hole drilling capacity to 20ft in length by 8” diameter. It can now also handle turning on lengths up to 20ft and pull boring jobs between two inches and 7-3/8” diameter up to 20ft lengths. New equipment includes seven lathes and three heavy-duty Sunnen honing machines that provide a honing capacity of 18.75” diameter and 25ft stroke. Honing capacity will increase to 24” diameter and 30ft lengths with the addition of a Sunnen HTG machine in February, and a new 6m drilling/pull boring machine will be delivered next April.

The new equipment allows Hole Specialists to meet the most exotic needs of new and current customers, and many of the requests are not for your average holes.

"We have got one project that is a 25ft long workpiece and we are going in a foot at each end, bottle honing and removing an inch of stock off the diameter," Robinson says. "Another is a 4.25” diameter, 10ft long off-center hole that can't be bored, so we are enlarging the gun-drilled hole 1.6” with a hone."

With new machines and new customers comes the need for additional employees, so Hole Specialists has added 26 new staff members this year, with an additional 6 to 10 positions to be filled.

"We are pretty selective with our new hires due to our work being highly specialized," Robinson states. "We also invest heavily in training for everyone we bring on, even if they have a hole drilling background, because we do things differently here."

Until the expansion is complete, all available hands are keeping the projects flowing.

"We have got four guys who do nothing but transfer work in and out of the shop all day because we don't have enough floor space to accommodate both the work pieces and the new machines," Robinson adds. "We are really looking forward to completion of the expansion."