​We are pleased to offer this interview with Mr. Jeff McLaughlin, founder and President of McLaughlin Furnace Group of Avilla, Indiana, USA. Jeff is going to give us his thoughts on where the company is going, the state of the heat treat industry and very optimistically tell us how he expects this to be a good year for the industry.

Jeff you are part of a very small group in that you are one of only a handful of people we have interviewed 3 times over the years. Because of this we are going to start off where we left off on your last interview-for our readers who would like to know the origins of McLaughlin Furnace Group we would refer you to Jeff McLaughlin, McLaughlin Furnace Group | The Monty

When we last spoke with you, you were having a record breaking year and you told us that 2019 sales were roughly $15 million USD. Has this upward trajectory continued since that time? Perhaps a fairer way to phrase this would be-how did the “COVID” year, 2020 effect you?

“This past year was definitely interesting for McLaughlin. Many heat treaters halted capital equipment during 2020, which definitely presented a slew of hurtles for our teams to overcome, but we were fortunate enough to have a large backlog of work which allowed us to bridge the gap. As other manufacturing facilities around the nation were forced to shut down due to Covid restrictions, the team here at McLaughlin put our noses to the grindstone and delivered a number of new furnaces, including an automated pusher furnace line, the first Tru-Carb batch IQ line, and a large car bottom line. And, I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t mention the number of service calls McLaughlin made around the country in 2020. Our service team is second to none and we couldn’t be prouder of the essential work they provided to our partners around the globe. And last, but not least, McLaughlin moved our Midwest location into its new manufacturing facility in Avilla, IN at the beginning of the third quarter last year.”

During our last conversation it came up that you were in the middle of your first “pusher” furnace installation. Is that project now concluded and how did it turn out? Being the first pusher you have ever made was it quite a learning experience?

“The pusher furnace was a custom one-of-one furnace for McLaughlin that proved to be quite a learning experience. The furnace is currently installed and turned over to the customer for running their beginning PPAP parts. I believe this project helped our company grow tremendously through experience and further recognition in the industry.”

You had another milestone in 2020 also in that you installed your first multi unit batch IQ installation. What can you share with us about the installation and the challenges associated with it?

“The first multi unit batch IQ line was a big release for McLaughlin in 2020. McLaughlin launched its first Tru-Carb IQ line with great success. Throughout the project, McLaughlin faced a few speedbumps in the road with material delivery as it seems everyone else has in the past year. As with any new product line, some minor design changes were implemented during start-up to deliver the total heat treat solution we wanted. The batch IQ furnaces have performed above our expectations with PPAP loads complete and showcasing quality results. The equipment line will be completely operational in production by May 1. Throughout 2021, we are looking forward to expanding the Tru-Carb line throughout North America.”

Another memorable event for you last year was a new building in Avilla. How about a few details about size and capabilities?

“Our new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant has allowed McLaughlin to expand our manufacturing and processing footprint from 12,500 square feet to 40,000 square feet. The new plant also features a 7,500 square foot office space. The manufacturing floor has two, ten ton, one-hundred-foot span cranes with an additional ten feet of height under crane hook compared to our previous facility. The increased manufacturing footprint and capabilities allows McLaughlin to greatly increase efficiencies and add benefits for employees such as the new workout facility. But, most importantly, it allows us to better serve our client partners.”

Reviewing your 2020 projects makes me wonder whether you ever sleep. Are there any other memorable events in the past year that come to mind?

“Two other large projects come to mind when looking back at the past year for McLaughlin. McLaughlin delivered the first part of an order for fifteen high temperature (1750 ±10°F) atmosphere box furnaces and two Tru-Mix endothermic generators for a customer in Vietnam. The remainder of this order is set to be completed over the course of the next year. McLaughlin is also about to install the first furnace of a car bottom furnace line. This car bottom line will have four total furnaces (24’ W x 25’ L x 11’ H; 300 to 2000 ±15°F) and a transfer car for transferring one of four cars to any available furnace or park position.”

Has the market changed at all in your opinion? Obviously COVID had a great effect on everybody but putting that aside in your opinion have there been many changes in the way heat treating furnaces are designed and built? Changes in competition-more or less? New competition?

“In my opinion, the heat treat equipment market has shifted from high volumes of new capital equipment to more equipment rebuilds and service to maintain existing equipment. We have seen an influx in the rebuild and service work requests to maintain equipment that was neglected in the lull of the 2020 market. Commercial and captive heat treaters seem to to be leaning toward investing in their current equipment and holding off on the larger capital expenses for the time being. I do see the market starting to shift back toward capital equipment as customers begin to develop more confidence in the market.

The competition seems to have stayed relatively consistent in the past few years for big players in the equipment industry. It’s apparent within the industry that McLaughlin is becoming recognized as a major player, and just to be clear, we’re not slowing down one bit. AFC and Surface Combustion are in our crosshairs.”

I have always had the impression that you like new opportunities. Pusher furnaces, batch IQ furnaces, carbottoms, endothermic generators-McLaughlin has covered a lot bases in the past few years. So the question is what will your next new opportunity be? Vacuum Carburizing? Vacuum furnaces-what would you like to try next?

“Keep your eyes peeled for our product line of vacuum furnaces in the coming months.”

McLaughlin Furnace Group consists of McLaughlin in Avilla, Indiana and also vacuum furnace specialist VESCO in East Hartford, CT. However it seems that the atmosphere group in Indiana gets all the attention and VESCO is not as well known. Perhaps you could share with us some information about VESCO-what they have to offer, size of the company and how they are doing these days.

“Vesco has always been the premier vacuum furnace service company in the northeast United States, but we feel that Vesco can service a much wider area than their current Northeast corridor. Vesco is now servicing customers regularly on the west coast. The goal is to continue gaining a foothold in the vacuum service work throughout the United States. Vesco’s main services include onsite furnace service, preventative maintenance, hot zones, rebuilding vacuum pumps, furnace rebuilds, control panels, and supplying a vast majority of spare parts. We have also been continuously adding building improvements to grow Vesco. We have recently added two more service technicians, new service vehicles, and leak detectors to expand our footprint.”

And now Jeff for my favorite question of all-what are you forecasting for 2021? Yes I do want to hear about your forecast for your company but more importantly I would like to know about the industry in general. You are out there in front of captive and commercial heat treaters constantly-what are you hearing?

“Since the beginning of 2021, we’ve seen a major increase in request for capital equipment quotes, but the orders have not been piling up, yet. The industry seems to be healing up as a whole and heat treaters seem to be gaining more assurance in the market. Many sectors of heat treat have been picking up quite rapidly according to our customers. Gun manufacturing is one that has been off the charts. Many other sectors are playing “catch-up” after the COVID shutdowns left some manufacturing with large voids. I foresee the capital equipment business climbing back up to its pre-COVID heights by the end of this year.”

Jeff as always I appreciate your time and look forward to catching up with you again in 2022.

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Since 1938 Park Thermal International in Georgetown, Ontario, Canada has had a medium presence in the North American heat treating industry and a small presence in the international market. The company has always dabbled in new furnaces while also selling used equipment combined with sales of generator catalyst. However they are best known for their quenching salts and it is seldom you don’t seen their products in a heat treat operation in North America doing any form of salt quenching.

Changes have been occurring at Park Thermal for some time now and generally not good changes. The long time President and owner, Mr. Brian Reid left the company last year and shortly thereafter the present owner of the company put the building and land up for sale. We will give you more details as they become available. In the meantime we leave you with this picture of Brian Reid. It was taken in 2019 at what was the Bluewater Thermal facility in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, Gord Montgomery of “The Monty Heat Treat News” is on the left, the Beingessner family who started this facility is in the middle and Brian Reid is on the right.

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Everybody in our industry understands that heat treating can be a dangerous business but it is a message which we believe should be repeated over and over. Recently a booklet was published in Germany in both German and English about heat treatment safety and regulations. The booklet was a joint effort and the main individual involved was Wolfram Schmid, the chairman of the AWT‘s FA08 with help from others including Ulrich Schwahn, a Plant Manager at a Bodycote facility in Germany. While the regulations published within the booklet are most applicable to the German heat treat market, all of the individuals involved have heat treating experience accumulated from around the world with the result that their conclusions would apply to heat treating anywhere in the world.

“Ulrich Schwahn; As you know safety in the heat treatment industry is very important to me which is why I was so pleased to have the opportunity, together with an excellent group of experts, to co-author a German booklet covering the combined knowledge. Since we felt that this specific information is not widely available in writing, combined with a perceived loss of know-how in heat treat operations, we were able to convince the DGUV to produce an English translation as well. Please find with this link the English version of the DGUV Rule, 109-605e. DGUV Rules are drawn up by experts at the German Social Accident Insurance, OSH- and industry professionals.

This one is specifically geared towards heat treat shops, offering practical advice to a wide range of safety related topics. https://publikationen.dguv.de/regelwerk/dguv-regeln/3866/metals-heat-treatment-sector Many references made in this document are pointing to German rules and regulations. Basis for these of course are underlying European laws. Having worked in the US and visited heat treat operations in China and other European countries as well, I feel – while these regulations are not necessarily binding for non-European countries – the hazards and best practices described can offer practical support in safety related questions for heat treat operations globally.”

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Our previous news item spoke of a very interesting booklet from Germany outlining safety in the German heat treat industry and the regulations that surround it. Unfortunately sometimes an accident is just that, an accident and almost impossible to prevent-this example from a SKF bearing facility in the USA in 2011 is a perfect example of this. We at “The Monty Heat Treat News” were very familiar with this facility (which is still in operation by the way) and the attached photos show the furnace where the accident occurred, these were taken just months before the accident. At the time this was a brand new multi million dollar furnace installation and based upon a proven design from a very respected furnace builder-the exact same furnaces had been in operation in Sweden for a number of years with no issues. It is hard to know how anybody could have reasonably foreseen this issue but it does show once again that safety can never be taken for granted.

“At approximately 8:30 a.m. on September 1, 2011, Employee #1 was working to repair a gantry crane. In close proximity to where Employee #1 was working, a heat treatment process was being performed that involved a robotic gantry crane, equipped with rectangular hollow metal arms, dipping metal parts into a molten salt solution. This heat treatment process (system) was built and designed by an overseas contractor in 2009. Over time, the upper left arm of the gantry crane used in this process filled up with water. When the upper left arm of the gantry crane was submerged in the liquid molten salt solution on this day, it expanded and pulled apart about seven inches.

This caused a rapid steam/expansion to occur, projecting liquid molten salt over an approximate 30 feet. Employee #1 was struck by the molten salt solution, causing severe chemical burns. As a result of the severity of Employee #1’s injury, he died several days later. The accident investigation revealed that the contributing factor of the incident was a result of the gantry-crane arm being hollow. If the arm would have been constructed of solid metal, water would not have leaked inside the arm. In addition, despite the final incident report not accounting for any additional employees being involved in the incident, the write-up reported that two other employees, both technicians, were also severely burned. These employees were employed by an overseas company assigned to perform warranty work on the heat treatment system.”

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GE Aviation recently auctioned off some very nice heat treating furnaces, now we have learned they will be offering another one in the near future. Manufactured by GH Induction Atmospheres of Rochester, NY this is a very unusual item, an Induction Heating Vacuum Furnace built in 2019. This particular unit has working dimensions of 12” X 16” and  a maximum operating temperature of 3200F. As far as we know GH is the only company to market this technology but in the right application the technology is hard to beat. More details coming.

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It has come to our attention at “The Monty Heat Treat News” that Thomas Persson has just been hired as a sales engineer for North American Cronite. Previous to this Thomas had some heat treat background with HTF furnaces of Wisconsin, a small furnace builder who we run across from time to time but have never known much about. Thomas will be based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Cronite is one of the largest suppliers of heat resistant castings in the world. 

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Ion Heat, one of the largest suppliers of Ion (Plasma) Nitriding systems is pleased to announce that they recently received an order for a “Glowfit” System from a heat treater in the US Northeast. While the company is best known for new systems they recently started offering retrofits for older systems either hot wall or cold wall for any make of plasma nitriding system. As we have mentioned many times recently nitriding, both gas and plasma has been growing rapidly recently. Back in 2028 we visited the company’s headquarters and we have this background.

“April 2018. Ion Heat, Columbia, South America; Compared to builders of batch IQ furnaces (sealed quench), vacuum furnaces or even mesh belt furnaces the number of builders of Plasma (Ion) Nitriding furnaces is very short-off the top of our heads we can only think of a handful, virtually all being based in Europe. An exception to this is Ion Heat a relatively new company which is based in Columbia, South America. In 2008 commercial heat treater TRATAR with plants in Peru and Columbia, started an R & D project with the goal of developing a simple, dependable Plasma nitriding system. After several years of testing Ion Heat was formed in 2012 and the end result is the company has a number of systems around the world including North America, South America and Asia. Ion Heat now has almost 50 employees and while best known for their Nitriders the firm also builds atmosphere furnaces, furnaces for third parties and is involved in a large vacuum furnace project. This photo shows part of the Ion Heat team as we saw them this week.”

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Bati Heat Treat in Monterrey, Mexico just installed and commissioned a new gas nitrider from German furnace builder KGO this week. Bati is a commercial heat treater headquartered in Izmir, Turkey-the Mexico facility was inaugurated in 2018.  The company now has 5 of these systems, 4 in Turkey and this one in their Monterrey facility. In this photo we see Ilker Seymen and Manager of the company.

Bearing manufacturer and captive heat treater JTEKT in Bedford, Quebec recently found that they had surplus heat treating capacity and the end result was that they elected to sell off a batch IQ furnace. The 36 X 48 X 36″ furnace was originally built by Williams Industrial Services of Bowling Green, Ohio, USA (whose ad can be found on this page) back in 2005 but had never seen much used over the years. The furnace ended up at another Canadian company.

Mesh Belt Brazing Furnace Off to Bulgaria. For a number of reasons it is seldom that used furnaces make an ocean voyage, reasons such as different voltages and equipment certifications but it does happen from time to time. In this case this mint condition BTU mesh belt furnace started off in Wisconsin and is now on a ship to Bulgaria where the end user a jewelry company is anxiously awaiting it’s arrival.

Out in Washington state, USA we see that foundry and captive heat treater Seacast is expanding their heat treat department with a bottom load vacuum furnace. Seacast is a privately held company which offers high precision investment castings and the company has a long history of investing in their heat treating department.

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So why is Rich Ott of auto parts supplier Linamar Gear positively dancing with joy? Because Rich just finished reading the  April 2021 issue of “The Monty Heat Treat News Magazine” The Monty Magazine April 2021 – Flipbook by The Monty | FlipHTML5 and now he is up to date on all the news and trends in the worldwide heat treatment industry.

Linamar Gear is a multi billion dollar per year auto parts supplier based in Canada. While many of their facilities around the world boast captive heat treat departments their location in Guelph is very unique. With twenty five 36 X 48 X 36 batch IQ furnaces in place the location has probably the largest batch IQ capacity in North America. Rich is a life long heat treater who has worked at companies such as Hinderliter Heat Treat and Bodycote and is in charge of all the heat treating at Linamar which means he made our recent list of the 30 Most Influential People in The North American Heat Treating Industry 2021 | The Monty In this photo he is seen with Gord Montgomery of “The Monty Heat Treat News”.

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We had the pleasure of working with Mike when he was a Sales Engineer for furnace builder AFC-Holcroft before he changed direction and joined commercial heat treater Paulo, the second largest commercial heat treater in North America https://themonty.com/project/largest-north-american-commercial-heat-treats-august-2020/ His experience will be missed.

“Paulo Kansas City Plant Manager Mike Neumann has retired effective March 25th, 2021. Mike led the Kansas City plant for 3 years, but his ties to Paulo and the thermal processing industry run much deeper. Not an uncommon story in heat treating Mike’s father was involved in the industry as well. Over his career Mike has been a competitor, a supplier, and a team member. His character fostered respect among those who crossed paths with him.

Tee Rassieur, VP of Operations, commented, “Thank you Mike. You built a strong team, furthered relationships with our customers, and left the Kansas City plant well positioned for the future. We wish you all the best in retirement”.

Mike has an extensive list of retirement activities planned including spending time with family, enjoying the outdoors by skiing and hiking, and all manner of adrenaline filled motorsports. Mike added, “Three years flew by, despite the trials of 2020. The plant is in a good position, thanks to the team and to Paulo. The Kansas City team shows its grit when times are tough, and they demonstrated that again through this past year”. Tim Mohr, Senior Director of Operations and Strategy, will fill the role of interim Plant Manager.

Founded in 1943, Paulo is one of the largest providers of thermal processing and metal finishing solutions in North America. Headquartered in St. Louis, Paulo operates six strategically-located divisions across the U.S. and Mexico. We deliver quality results with datagineering: blending the best in automation, data, and human expertise.”

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