“The Monty Heat Treat News” is absolutely ecstatic to present to you today the latest “Heat Treat Podcast” in which are handsome host Mr. Carlos Torres speaks with Mr. Mark Podob about carburizing of ultra large gears. Mark is President of Metlab Heat Treat of Wyndmoor, PA, USA a heat treat which has the distinction of having the largest commercially available pit carburizing furnaces in North America. Ultra Large Gear Carburizing | Mark Podob | THE HEAT TREAT PODCAST #49 – YouTube
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August 1st, 2022 Dynametal Technologies of Brownsville, TN, USA filed for Chapter 11 Protection with liabilities equal to or greater than assets. Dynametal was a producer of powdered metal components and as such had a reasonably large heat treat/sintering department which was fairly typical of a powdered metal house-a combination of mesh belt sintering lines and steam treatment furnaces. January 18th of 2023 all of the assets will be going to auction. From a heat treat standpoint the only items of interest are 5 Sinterite and Abbott mesh belt sintering furnaces.
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Solar Atmospheres of Michigan, formerly Vac-Met, has recently purchased 18,000 square feet of plant space on four plus acres in Chesterfield Michigan. The new building is 20 miles Northeast of the two existing Vac-Met facilities which are currently located in Warren and Fraser Michigan.
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“It all started in early 2018, when a “rush” sample on its way to an external laboratory got lost in transit, for three days! Shortly after that, Joseph McBride, a Heat Treater turned Quality Manager discovered that a different laboratory had mounted and tested a sample incorrectly, marking the results as “not conforming to requirements.” In both cases the product couldn’t be shipped until all testing was complete which meant it would now be late to the customer.
Tired of constant delays like these that always led to customer dissatisfaction, Joseph decided to take control. With over fifteen years of experience in the heat-treating industry and an immense focus on customer needs, quality, and process improvement, he approached the owner of Oregon Induction + Thermal and presented the idea of starting a laboratory that could serve both internal and external customers with better service and faster turn-times than other laboratories in the area.
By mid-2021, customers began requesting services that On-Time Labs didn’t provide, Mechanical Testing. Not wasting any time, Joseph was at it again. Researching, planning, and implementing everything that would be needed to serve their customers needs better and faster. And in late 2021, they opened their mechanical testing department complete with state-of-the-art CNC mill & lathe, Charpy and Tensile Testing. On•Time Labs – Material and Metallurgical Testing and Analysis (ontimelabs.com)”
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For at least part of this period a Texas fellow by the name of Jarod Hammar was Vice President of the company. Things change and very recently, within the past few weeks as a matter of fact Jarod left the company and started his own company “Cutting Edge Powder Coating” in Cypress, Texas. Obviously this move was in the works for some time. We wish Jarod the best of luck as an entrepreneur working for himself.
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We recently ran across an article published in Canadian Fabricating & Welding about a commercial heat treat start up which “The Monty Heat Treat News” is very familiar with-Salto Heat Treating. Read the story about how this shop started up in the midst of the recent pandemic.
You wouldn’t think that launching a new business in the middle of the pandemic would be a recipe for success, but Salto Heat Treating is proving this wrong.
The northern Ontario shop, located in Coniston just outside of Sudbury, opened its doors on May 4, 2020, and has been successfully providing heat-treating services to customers across Canada ever since.
“While Salto has only been open for the last 2 ½ years, I’ve been in the heat-treating industry for 30 years,” said Christophe Mehanna, general manager, Salto Heat Treating. “It’s always been my dream to run my own shop, and when I realized a great opportunity presented itself, I reached out to a good friend of mine, Felix Lopes Jr.”
Lopes Jr., president of Lopes Ltd., a Coniston-based steel fabricator, was approached by Mehanna to invest in a new heat-treating company in the city.
“Felix saw that this opportunity made a lot of sense,” said Mehanna. “So, he invested and that’s how it started. With my experience in heat treating and his vast experience running many successful industrial businesses, we spent over a year on the road looking for equipment and planning and designing a fully automated, state-of-the-art heat-treating facility.”
The Facility
Located in an industrial park, Salto employs eight people, including Mehanna; six are on the shop floor and two are in the office. It has 24,000 sq. ft. of floor space that has been meticulously designed with eight furnaces, including the shop’s custom-built, fully automated Integral Quench (IQ) line.
“It was very important for us to go after the latest technology to be able to provide the best production and quality standards that our customers have come to expect from us,” said Mehanna. “Felix was adamant that we have the best equipment with the latest technology. That’s why we decided to custom build our furnaces rather than just buy what was available on the market.”
The shop was able to custom build its IQ line in part because of the team’s extensive heat-treating experience.
Accuracy and uniformity are essential for good heat-treating practices and having equipment that could perform both to a high degree was necessary. The IQ line is highly automated and includes digital equipment and controllers. To meet surface smoothness requirements, the shop added probes and pyrometers inside the furnace to monitor the temperatures.
“The advantage of going digital is that we can remotely monitor everything about the system,” said Mehanna. “If there’s any error, the burner goes down, or the furnace troubleshoots, I get notifications on my phone. We couldn’t do that with some of the other equipment on the market. I can receive emails updating me about our furnaces and I can fix or troubleshoot right from my laptop. I can have our automation engineers go in and fix any problems rather than having to go onto the shop floor in many cases, which makes fixes much quicker and more efficient.”
Mehanna and his team spent over a year on the road looking for equipment, planning, and designing a fully automated, state-of-the-art heat-treating facility.
The fully automated line serves its customers well and allows the shop to take on projects that its competitors might not be able to do.
“Our IQ line is very unique because of the customization we were able to put into it,” said Mehanna. “There are furnaces out there that are a lot bigger than ours, but most standard furnaces that shops are working with are a lot smaller than what we have.”
Salto is ISO 9001:2015 certified and a member of the Metal Treating Institute. Additionally, all of the company’s furnaces and probes are calibrated and certified. Mehanna noted that not all other heat treaters calibrate their furnaces, but at Salto, they ensure that when they say the furnace is 1,500 degrees F, that’s exactly what is it.
Heat-treating Services
The shop provides various heat-treating processes, including annealing, through hardening, case hardening, carburizing, air hardening, normalizing, stress relieving, high- and low-frequency induction hardening, along with cutting services and a metallurgy lab with a digital hardness tester and metallurgical analysis.
“There is a lot of variety in terms of what we can offer,” said Mehanna. “Upwards of 85 per cent is focused on the mining industry with the remainder in agriculture and forestry. With low-frequency induction hardening, our scanners can go up to 7 ft., whereas most can only do up to 3 ft. We are one of very few companies in Ontario that can do this.”
More recently, the company invested in a high-frequency induction scanner after a globally recognized customer requested it. While the team had no experience using the high-frequency scanner initially, they were able to lean on Mehanna’s experience with low-frequency scanners and learn with the help of metallurgists and the customer how best to use this new heat-treating device.
The rod induction systems are fully automated and outfitted with heat sensors to ensure that each rod reaches the exact same temperature.
“Uniformity is very important to provide quality heat-treating services,” said Mehanna. “With this we can ensure that from the first to the last rod, each is the same hardness.”
The shop’s custom-designed, fully automated IQ line is a furnace that can reach temperatures of 1,850-degrees F (1,010-degrees C) to harden different parts for mining exploration.
“While we have eight furnaces, the IQ furnace is the only one that does the hardening on all the different applications for us,” said Mehanna. “Once they are removed from the IQ furnace, we can put them in other furnaces for tempering and stress relieving, depending on part requirements.”
Most of the work that Salto undertakes is destined for through hardening, which is done in an atmosphere-controlled furnace, where parts are heated to an exact temperature and then quenched in oil, ensuring minimal warping and uniform properties to the parts. Through hardening is a process that hardens the part all the way through to the core. This process differs from case hardening, which tends to be a more cost-effective option with fast turnaround. Although it only provides hardening of the surface, it still delivers improved part or component wear resistance. What often dictates the type of hardening required is the material type. For example, through hardening only works on specific materials such as 4140 steel, whereas 8620 steel can only be case hardened.
Day-to-Day Operations
On any given day, Salto may have a variety of different parts coming through the doors, but one thing that remains the same is its commitment to a 24- to 48-hour turnaround. The day always starts with a safety talk and then the dedicated team begins loading parts into the baskets. Operating on the premise of organization and efficiency, the shop aims to create its schedule for the entire week ahead. However, with numerous tasks and jobs arising at various times, and to meet the tight turnaround and it’s own set standards, the team tackles whatever comes in right away.
“I can honestly say that in our few short years of operation, we have always been able to deliver on our promised time commitment,” said Mehanna. “And while it is challenging to find good employees, I’m blessed with the talented team we have here. Working in heat treating is my passion and I look forward to coming to work every day and seeing the team. Every day brings a new challenge and opportunity and that keeps us motivated.”
Working in the mining industry, Mehanna has seen significant changes in the parts that come in for heat treating over the years, and mining parts are often treated very differently than automotive or aerospace components. In recent years, there has been a push to make mining components that can be used more than once.
“The parts we see today are more advanced and are designed with a longer lifecycle, which means they need to be more durable,” he said. “Heat treating hardens the part so it can be used more than once while providing a longer life as opposed to being disposed of for not holding up to harsh conditions.”
While the shop has only been open for a few years, it has always expanded into new areas as customer demand dictates. “We are looking at investing in a pit furnace for drill rods that are used for blasting on highways rather than mining applications,” said Mehanna. “We see this as an area of opportunity and feel like right now, without the pit furnace, we are missing out on quite a bit of work. These furnaces are designed for longer rods, up to 12 ft. long, and right now, we just don’t have the capacity to handle something of this length. Fortunately, we are always growing and expanding so I anticipate this will be something we can offer in the future.”
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“A two-chamber CaseMaster EvolutionR furnace from SECO/VACUUM will be used in the EV maker’s R&D lab to low-pressure carburize (LPC) and oil quench prototype gears. Currently, the electric vehicle manufacturer sends their prototype gears out to local commercial heat treatment shops, and there are often scheduling delays. By adding in-house heat treatment capability, the customer is expecting to remove the barriers to accelerating new product development, independent of outside influences.
SECO/VACUUM, a division of SECO/WARWICK Group will deliver the CaseMaster Evolution (CMe) model in the family, with a working hot zone of 16″x16″x24″ (400x400x600mm) and a load capacity of 440 lb / 200 kg. The CMe-D model has a separate heating chamber, where product is heated and carburized; and a quenching chamber, where the load is immersed in an oil bath for rapid quenching. Both chambers are isolated with a vacuum door.
The CMe-D 2-chamber vacuum furnace has been proven to be the LPC vacuum carburizing furnace of choice for heat treating automotive components. It maintains high volume throughput of bright, high quality parts in an economical package. Testing processes with the laboratory configuration allows the customer to move from pilot to large scale production with predictable performance.
The R&D vacuum furnace order is just the latest in a broad range of technologies ordered by this EV manufacturer. Globally, SECO/WARWICK Group has cooperated on several other projects, including multiple CAB (controlled atmosphere brazing) equipment for its factory in China for cooling EV batteries, as well as heat treatment and nitriding equipment for tool & die molds in the southwest US, used to make automotive chassis.
Peter Zawistowski, SECO/VACUUM Managing Director, said, “We have a strong partnership together, having commissioned a number of highly successful heat treat furnaces that provide a wide variety of processes in their plants across the world. Together with our global parent, SECO/WARWICK, we not only provide them with a level of unmatched service, we have an international footprint to support our partner wherever they operate.”
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While we wait patiently for the podcast we can offer you this glimpse into the owner and the company itself. In the meantime to view all of our past podcasts with our charming and eloquent host, Mr. Carlos Torres follow this link.
Mark Podob, Metlab
Mark Podob, born in Brooklyn, New York, resides in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He is a graduate metallurgist, holding a Bachelor of Engineering in Metallurgical Engineering from New York University, 1971 and a Masters of Materials Science also from New York University, 1973.
Mr. Podob has over 50 years in the industry. His career started as a Materials Engineer with Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in East Hartford, Connecticut, working in a failure analysis group on a broad base of materials and jet engine components. He moved into an alloy development group and spent several years working on hot isostatically pressed near net shaped superalloy powder metal turbine disks as an alternate manufacturing processing technique for forged nickel base turbine disk production.
After several years in engineering positions in the powder metal field, Mr. Podob took a position with the fledging Titanium Nitride (TiN) coating industry, working for several companies providing commercial services and equipment for PVD and CVD TiN coatings. These coatings dramatically extend the life of tooling for a variety of cutting and forming applications. Shortly afterwards, he joined Abar, a leader in the manufacture of vacuum furnaces and was responsible for the company’s plasma nitriding and carburizing licensed technologies. After the merger of Abar and Ipsen Industries, and then the absorption of Abar by Ipsen, Mr. Podob was responsible for the supervision of the company’s six field sales offices, regional sales managers, and field service engineers. In 1998 with James Conybear, Technical Director of Ipsen, Mr. Podob acquired the assets and ongoing business of Metlab, a commercial heat-treating company whose equipment included what is believed to be the largest commercial atmosphere-controlled carburizing furnaces in North America. With pit furnaces having work zones up to 15′ in diameter in outside diameter by 12′ deep for carburizing and nitriding large gears, and 6′ in diameter by 18′ long for processing pinion shafts, the company can process large gears and pinions. In 2019 Mr. Conybear retired, and Mr. Podob became the sole owner of the company.
Metlab Company
Metlab was founded in 1928 as one of the oldest heat treat companies in North America. Located in a northern suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania it employs a staff of about 45. Including Mr. Podob, there are three metallurgists on staff. The company was founded by Horace Knerr who among other product offerings, was a manufacturer of aluminum spars for bi-planes and the inventor of the gantry furnace. He needed a furnace to quench aluminum quickly, and this furnace which was located on stilts and had a quench tank that could be wheeled into place to provide a rapid quench, fit the bill. During WWII, the company employed over 300 people in a 125,000 square foot facility. At the end of the war, the company focused primarily on heat treating large parts, and specialized on deep case carburizing and nitriding large gears, bearings and structures, a core competency still stressed by the current ownership today.
Horace Knerr passed away in 1956, and left the company to his sons Conrad, an MIT graduate and Barry, who held a degree from the Wharton Business School of Economics. They operated the business until it was sold in 1998 maintaining the company’s focus on large part heat treating. The company was renamed Metlab.
One of the first demonstrated large parts projects the company tackled shortly after its acquisition by Podob and Conybear was the carburizing of large and ultra large bearing races for the windmill industry. These large bearing races, carburized to 0.150″ case depth require the development of special press quench fixturing to keep parts round and flat, minimizing the amount of grind stock removal. The heat treating of large gears and pinions quickly followed. These parts require not only specialized equipment to handle the large parts, but also an expertise in metallurgical control to ensure proper microstructure and mechanical properties as well as fixturing for minimum distortion and size control. The largest gears that the company has carburized to date has been a pair of rolling mill gears which were solid gearing, left hand and right hand herringbone gears which were mated to form a single, solid gear, weighing more than 95,000 pounds and a case depth of 0.250″. Metlab has also been active in the nitriding of main propulsion ship drive gears since the late 1970’s for the Seawolf Submarine and other naval vessels programs, as well as tank turret gearing and other military projects.
Recognizing the need for expanding the business, in 2001, the current Metlab acquired the John V. Potero Company, which gave it the capability to heat treat small parts as well as the ability to do black oxide finishing, allowing for expanded services, making it a full-service thermal processing facility. And the addition of a fleet of trucks gave the company the ability to provide a pickup and delivery service in the tri-state area adjacent to the Philadelphia based factory expanding the customer base for the company.
With the additional role of new customers such as the rocket companies filling the void left by NASA outsourcing, where particularly large parts will require thermal processing, coupled growth of our established customer base, we will see continued growth. Significant importance in new processes such as preoxidation thermal treatments for land-based turbine disks and specialized tooling will represent one area for expanded opportunities.
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The January issue of “The Monty Heat Treat News” is now published and available on line at The Monty Magazine January 2023 – Flipbook by The Monty | FlipHTML5 This 74 page edition includes the latest news and trends from the global heat treatment industry. Featured articles include;
- A USA heat treater will be adding substantial batch IQ Capacity in 2023-a “Monty” Exclusive
- Ask the “Heat Treat Recruiter, a regular column from “International Search Partners” dealing with finding, hiring and keeping good employees in the Heat Treatment Industry
- A captive heat treater in the USA is poised to receive a Salt Recovery System for their austempering line-you will only find this story at “The Monty”
- Read about a European Auto Parts Supplier installing a Chamber Furnace Heat Treat Line
- “Do Manufacturers Make Good Commercial Heat Treaters-Kern Liebers”, only available at “The Monty”
- Bodycote Facility Receives New Nitriding System
In addition to these news items scroll through our used equipment listings featuring one of the largest selections of used heat treat furnaces in the world Used Equipment | The Monty. Find or sell high quality used furnaces. The entire “Monty Heat Treat News” Team as always welcomes your thoughts, comments and feedback. Sincerely Gord, Jordan, Dale and Anne.
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We mention with regret the recent passing of Steve Hawkins, Owner & CEO of Solution Steel Treating; “Steven Richard Hawkins, age 61, passed away suddenly in his sleep on Monday, December 26, 2022. He was born November 27, 1961 in Highland Park, MI to Marilyn and Richard Hawkins. Steve is survived by his adored wife of eleven years, Jennifer; his daughter, Heather (Justin) Marks; his son, Jonathon Hawkins; grandsons, Elliot and Graham Marks; parents, Marilyn Hawkins and Richard Hawkins; sister, Linda (Martin) Reid and brother, Kenneth Hawkins. As well as his long time friend Grant Mayes, his cherished dog Maylee, and many extended family and friends.
Steve was the hardworking owner and CEO of Solution Steel Treating in Shelby Township, MI. When he was not hunting or trap shooting in the off-season, Steve also enjoyed fishing, playing keno, drag racing, and reading. Known by his loved ones as “The Real MacGyver,” with the most generous heart. Steve handcrafted numerous pieces for his wife’s dance studio that he was so incredibly proud of. Steve will be dearly missed by everyone that knew him.”
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