“The Monty Heat Treat News” is rather proud of the fact that for a number of years now we have been offering a heat treat industry exclusive in the form of an annual list of the largest single location captive (in-house) heat treaters in North America https://themonty.com/project/15-largest-captive-heat-treats-north-america/  

The criteria are simple in that this list only includes single location manufacturing facilities and not total heat-treating capacity in North America. As an example the ZF Transmission facility in South Carolina makes this list but overall this plant is only a small percentage of the heat treating capacity ZF has in North America.

As you would expect this is a work in progress as facilities close, others add more heat treat capacity, some reduce the number of furnaces they have-all of this means that our list is constantly being modified which brings us to our story for today-American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM).

This is what Wikipedia has to say about the company; “American Axle & Manufacturing, Inc. (AAM), headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, is an American manufacturer of automobile driveline and drivetrain components and systems. AAM was founded in 1994 when a private investor group, led by Richard E. “Dick” Dauch, James W. McLernon, Raymond Park and Morton E. Harris purchased the Final Drive and Forge Business Unit from GM’s Saginaw Division. In 1999, AAM went public, and is traded as “AXL” on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). AAM has grown to supply various OEM manufacturers around the globe in the passenger car, light truck, and commercial vehicle segments.”

The firm has in-house heat-treating capacity at various facilities around the world, the USA, Poland and Mexico all come to mind and usually it takes the form of Batch IQ (Sealed Quench) or pusher furnaces-usually a combination of both. If you refer to our list of the largest you will see that we have the AAM location in Silao, Guanajuato, Mexico in the number 10 position-however we have reason to believe that it should be ranked much higher than that. Since the last visit by “The Monty” in 2020 we understand that more heat-treating capacity has been added and that this facility should now be rated in the 5 largest in North America-we hope that at some point we will be able to offer more details. 

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