“Abbott Furnace Company has recently designed, manufactured and installed a 6,000 SCFH Endothermic Gas Generator at Sintergy Inc. in Reynoldsville, PA. The design of the Abbott SP-6000 generator is a modular concept with each module producing up to 6000scfh of endothermic gas. This generator brings an innovative retort design that allows a single retort to produce endo gas at this rate without sacrificing gas quality and maintaining 6:1 turndown ratio. The team at Sintergy is pleased with the level of control that the new system gives them and said that they were only seeing ±1°F in dewpoint variation from setpoint. Abbott has included all the improvements you would expect to see in new equipment today including state of the art controls with Allen Bradley PLC, data logging, dewpoint and methane sensors and updated gas safety system.

Abbott Furnace is an industrial furnace manufacturer with 35 years of experience designing and producing some of the industry’s most reliable and high performing industrial continuous process furnaces. Abbott is a leading producer of industrial sintering furnaces, annealing furnaces, tempering furnaces, brazing furnaces, heat treat furnaces, steam treat furnaces, industrial ovens, CAB furnaces, High-Temperature Furnaces and other specialty furnace products. Abbott Furnace is a privately owned company located in St. Marys, Pennsylvania.  Abbott furnaces are proudly manufactured in the USA.”

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Today, Wednesday September 9th furnace builder SECO/WARWICK will be offering an online seminar about Heat Treatment and Metallurgy https://www.secowarwick.com/en/eseminar/ This looks to be a very well organized event which has been some time in the making. As we have reported in the past virtually all heat treatment exhibitions for 2020 have been cancelled and moved to a “virtual” format, this will be one of the first “virtual” events so we will watch with bated breath to see what attendance is like for this event.

“No fairs and no meeting opportunities? The heavy industry has found a way to move on. On September 9, experts, specialists, academic lecturers, companies’ presidents from all over the world affiliated with metal heat treat processes will meet at an industry event – e-SEMINAR 4.0 Heat Treatment and Metallurgy. This is an international seminar organized by SECO/WARWICK from Świebodzin – the world leader in heat treatment and vacuum metallurgy.

Can it be done online? “In just a few months, the world moved online and leads a parallel life there: private, professional and business,” says Katarzyna Sawka, Vice President – Marketing at the SECO/WARWICK Group. “Industry, technology, business trades, shows, conferences and seminars have almost all been canceled, and the enormous potential of the world of science, technology and business has gone into hibernation. e-SEMINAR 4.0 Heat treatment and metallurgy is to meet the needs of meeting, sharing experience and moving forward after a short suspension period” – adds K. Sawka. Online transmission, interaction, simulation of the conditions of a trade seminar in real life is very difficult, but breaking technological barriers, learning in practice, the creativity of technological applications in everyday life takes place at the industry level every day. The same strategy was used to create the e-seminar.

Canceled industry events – specialists stayed at home; The Metal Heat Treatment Industry traditionally meets at over a dozen events a year. Themost important, most popular events are cancelled. This applies to South Africa, Asia, and Europe. “Any cancellation with the reference to a single conference, fair, seminar is not a problem for the entire industry, specialists, companies, businesses but not all of them at the same time. This is a systematic limitation we had to find solution for ” – adds Sawka. The prolonged crisis and the growing need for group interaction at the professional level made SECO/WARWICK, together with content partners and media patrons, decide to create an event that would meet these needs using the best technologies available in the world for interactive meetings.”

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Swiss furnace builder Codere (whose ad can be found on this page) has a new sales person. Jean-Michel Bilger was recently hired by the company to replace Olivier Chevre who left Codere earlier this year to take a position in another industry.  Commercial heat treater Metlab in Pennsylvania, USA has a new quality manager; “Metlab continues to build a successful business by providing quality heat treating and surface finishing services for its customers. To ensure this legacy, Metlab has recently hired Tom Guilliams as the Quality Manager for the company. Mr. Guilliams started with Metlab in June 2020 and brought with him extensive experience in Quality Control as well as metallurgical testing. He oversees a wide range of processes and procedures, including production planning and material management. “I manage with understanding and frequent communication,” Guilliams comments. “Engaging everyone in the Quality program requires patience. It is a learning process that I share with others, and it is an essential part of the continuous improvement process.”

We see that Tim Josephs of Production Technologies International a heat treat manufacturers rep firm covering areas such as Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and several other US Midwest states recently signed up with a ne principal. Tim is now repping for alloy supplier Cronite in his territory. Cronite is one of the largest high temperature alloy suppliers in the world and their banner ad can be found on this page. One of our favorite Marketing people is Katarzyna (Kasia) Sawka of furnace builder SECO/WARWICK in Poland. After 5 years at the company we see she was just promoted to VP of Marketing a position which we certainly feel she deserves. We hunted through our file photos and found this picture of Kasia taken at the 2015 heat treat show in Cologne, Germany. It is worth mentioning that the fellow on the left is Mr. Kent Zuo, of Shanghai Heat Treat, one of the largest commercial heat treaters in China.

It would appear that we will not be seeing Steve Miller of controls company Eurotherm at future heat treat exhibitions. Steve has been in the industry for something like 30 years the whole time with Eurotherm. However he recently received a promotion to Global Business Development Manager – Semi Conductor which means he will largely be exiting the heat treat industry.

Let us move on to equipment news. Captive heat treater and aerospace industry supplier Cherry Aerospace out in Californina is in the process of installing a brand new vacuum furnace.

Cherry Aerospace is headquartered in Santa Ana, California, USA, and is a member of the PCC Fastener Products Division of Precision Castparts (PCC). Heat Treatment Australia (HTA) recently added a furnace at their Los Angeles, California, facility. The furnace is designed for precipitation hardening and has working dimensions of 48” X 48” X 168” which means it can handle parts up to 14’ in length.

From Fort Worth, Texas, USA we have this photo of an Ipsen 6 bar vacuum furnace. This is the newest vacuum furnace installed at the Fort Worth facility of commercial heat treater Texas Heat Treating.

We’ve told you before how East Carolina Metal Treating in Raleigh North Carolina will be putting their Virginia Metal Treating facility in Lynchburg, Virginia into a new building. Work is progressing and this is what the building looks like now.

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VCST https://bmtdrivesolutions.com/  is a division of the BMT Group of Belgium, a company which supplies gear drives around the world. Our interest in the company stems from the fact that their locations in Belgium and Mexico both have substantial in house heat treat departments which are being joined by their location in Changzhou, China which has just installed their own heat treat department. Below we have a press release and photos from the company announcing the new department in China. Below this we have two photos and a summary of their heat treating capabilities in Mexico, this is the result of our visit earlier this year.

“VCST has been producing high-quality parts for the automotive sector in China for nearly ten years now. Recently, our business line rail has started to produce gears in our Changzhou plant as well. Usually, these gears are larger than the ones that are produced for the automotive market. That is why we have installed a separate heat treatment installation in this plant. As we speak, the installation is still being tested and being prepared for use. Upon completion, Changzhou will have its own in-house heat treatment installation just like our plants in Belgium and Mexico.

Apart from being able to process larger gears, there were other reasons for installing an in-house heat treatment installation. Larger gears produced for the railway market tend to be more complex. Therefore, this new installation gives us increased control and responsibility in the production of gears for rolling stock. Finally, there will also be increased efficiency as we will be able to compare gears more easily before and after hardening them. This will provide us with useful information to make adaptations before the hardening process and, in turn, deliver gears of an even higher quality.

The manufacturer of the installation is already well-established within BMT Drive Solutions as they have already provided the heat treatment installations for our plants in Belgium and Romania. For our plant in Changzhou, they provided a license for a Chinese company to build their design. During and after the building stage, visits were scheduled to check up on the progress made. However, the coronavirus pandemic disturbed that idea causing the check-ups to happen online. The time difference between China and Europe made this especially challenging. In the end though, the entire process was finished rather smoothly.

As it stands, 1 furnace has already been approved meaning we can start focussing on the heat treatment of railway parts produced in our VCST plant in Changzhou. The in-house heat treatment installation in Changzhou is a source of great enthusiasm for all our colleagues. With this new installation, they will now be able to deliver top-quality service to rolling stock operators in China as well.”

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March 18/2020. “VCST is a division of the BMT Group of Belgium, a company which supplies gear drives around the world. Out interest with the company today is in their Leon, Mexico facility which we visited just over a week ago. This is a gear company, a gear company which supplies the automotive, rail and industrial markets and who heat treat their products in house. It should come as no surprise to anybody that company chose the most common and versatile style of furnace in the world to do their heat treating-standard batch IQ furnaces. The firm has 5 batch IQ furnaces with working dimensions of 36″X 48″ X 36″ all gas fired with endothermic atmospheres. In the past the company has had some requirements for press quenching however as we observed they have never actually brought this in house. What we saw was a clean, well run company overall with a quite impressive heat treating department. In one of these pictures we see on the left Juan Gutierrez and on the right Salvador Murillo, General Manager of SSi, Mexico.”

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For years now we have been running across a fellow by the name of Eric Nordin who is part of a very small, elite group-a sales representative in the commercial heat treating industry. We are not being facetious when we say this, there are few individuals out there whose entire lives have been dedicated to selling heat treatment services. Eric’s background includes Sales Manager at Thermal One in Westland, Michigan and Technical Sales at Schmolz & Bickenbach in Carol Stream, Illinois. Eric just this week joined the team at Sun Steel Treating in South Lyon, Michigan where his primary responsibility will be to enhance the rapidly expanding vacuum hardening department. While Sun is one of the largest plasma nitriding facilities in North America they have plans to dramatically grow the vacuum side of things. With 65 employees the company is a substantial heat treater and we are looking forward to profiling the company in the near future.

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A reader (Allied Heat Treat in Canada to be exact) came across one of our earliest newsletters and sent it over to us. This particular issue dates back to December of 2000 at which point we had been publishing “The Monty” for a little over 2 years. This issue looks rather modest now but it certainly brings back memories. We had to find an appropriate photo to go with it and sticking with our the of going back in time we came across this picture taken at a heat treat show in Reno, Nevada in 2006. In this photo we see Michael Korwin of Nitrex fame and Gord Montgomery.

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“The Monty Heat Treat Magazine Now Available”. The September 2020 issue of “The Monty” covering the latest news and trends in the worldwide heat treatment industry is now available at https://themonty.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/themontyseptember2020-1.pdf

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We need to add some background to this interesting press release. Aaron comes from an alloy background having worked with alloy supplier Wirco of Avilla, Indiana for many years. He became a manufacturers rep a few years back taking over the rep business of John Hansen. We rummaged through our files and came up with this picture of Aaron which was taken in 2016. Aaron attended the wedding of Carlos Torres of furnace builder Mattsa which took place in San Luis Potosi and in this photo we see Aaron in the centre in the black shirt. 

“Solar Manufacturing is pleased to announce that Aaron Ackerman of Met–Pro, Inc. will assume the role of Sales Representative for Michigan. Aaron started in the thermal processing industry in 2004 with Wirco and worked through the ranks from Account Manager to Business Development Manager. He traveled all over the USA, Canada and Mexico helping customers with their alloy needs for furnaces. In 2017, Aaron joined Met-Pro with previous owner, John Hansen, and in June 2018, Aaron took over the business.

Aaron states, “When the opportunity came up to work with the Jones’ family, and their line of vacuum furnaces, I knew it would be a great fit to our lineup of the best suppliers in the world in the thermal processing industry. For more information on Met-Pro, Inc., contact Aaron at [email protected].”

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To go with this interesting press release we have a photo of the HTSU booth taken at the ASM heat treat exhibition in Detroit, Michigan, USA in 2015. Kyle Favors is wearing the black jacket in the centre.

“Greenville, SC: Today, Heat Treating Services Unlimited Inc (HTSU), a Greenville, SC. based pyrometry laboratory, with four (4) additional locations, announced that it has invested in equipping and training its entire organization with the new cloud-based pyrometry management solution, C3 Data.  Beginning in 2019 and gradually deploying across its entire client base, HTSU now offers its clientele real-time reporting that is created with the C3 Data platform.

On the decision to invest in the C3 Data platform, Kyle Favors (CEO of HTSU) said, “In reviewing multiple pyrometry software systems, which all seem to have a portion of what we were looking for but not the whole package, we reviewed C3 Data.  After talking with Nathan Wright (CEO, C3 Data) how the C3 Data platform works and having them come in for a demo, we found the company we could partner with. The C3 Data platform met our goals to drive compliance to our industry specs like AMS2750 and CQI-9, eliminate potential for human error, ease of scheduling, accelerate the ‘time to delivery’ of reports and technical support that we could depend on. While our customers will maintain the excellent client care they’ve come to expect from us over the last 22 years, we now offer an even higher level of trust and service through C3 Data’s industry-leading platform both onsite as well as our inhouse laboratory.”               

About HTSU: Heat Treating Services Unlimited, Inc. is a global field services and ANAB accredited testing and calibration laboratory specializing in the thermal processing industry. HTSU is the leading authority for heat treat equipment maintenance, refractory, calibration, repair, consulting, testing and training services.

Headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, with service offices in North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan and Kansas, with maintain service contracts in more than 32 states, Canada, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. We have reshaped our portfolio, bringing complementary services to strengthen our position in the marketplace. The result is a multi-business thermal processing service company.  www.htsu.com

About C3 Data:  C3 Data is a cloud-based software platform, built for the heat-treatment industry, that enables heat treaters to comply with specifications such as AMS2750 and CQI-9. The company leverages the cloud and mobile technology to build its solutions around industry specs and empower heat treaters, labs, and sensor manufacturers to work collaboratively to achieve compliance. www.C3data.com”

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