All of the employees at Dana Lafayette Manufacturing in Lafayette, Indiana, USA were evacuated yesterday for a few hours after a small fire in the heat treat department. Because the fire department arrived within minutes the fire was quickly contained although no cause is yet known. This gear manufacturer was originally Oerlikon Fairfield before being purchased by Dana last year. Their heat treat department includes press quenching.

Even after over 20 years of publishing “The Monty” we are still surprised at what catches peoples attention and what doesn’t. For instance last week we had a rather brief news item about an alloy theft from an ArcelorMittal facility in Indiana (clarification; by alloy we mean any high nickel content material used in a heat treat such as base trays, baskets, muffles, etc. Theft needs no explanation).

This has always been an issue for heat treaters because depending upon the current price of alloy these items can be worth quite a bit of money and most are completely anonymous-not many serial numbers on a 330SS basket (by the way alloy theft is not quite as common these days because the price of nickel has dropped over the past few years, but it is still prevalent-see this chart). 

With this background out of the way we will now say that for some reason this story hit a nerve with heat treaters and solicited a number of comments;

Pusher Furnaces. For years we ran HU cast base trays from Alcon Industries through our pushers. We always thought the life was rather short until we started realizing we could find very few used trays. Turns out somebody was stealing them but as we had a rather large lay off shortly thereafter we never did find out who was taking them, just that we stopped losing them.

Dan Hicks, Owner High Desert Heat Treating LLC; Had some Jabronis come into shop offer me to buy my used temper furnace but needed some baskets to go with it. Loaded up some baskets and a base tray. They said they would send a truck for temper. I checked their business card right after they left, no business existed and address was under an overhead train in Chicago. They gave me some cash for baskets and trays so it really wasn’t theft and the age of the baskets and tray would have been hard to prove theft. Scam for sure.

Richard Wilson Jr., P.E. Owner at Wilson Metallurgical Laboratories; I worked for foundry once who had a man who left work in a long over coat on a dry 70 degree day. He tripped in the parking lot and couldn’t get back up for all of the copper he had stuffed into the coat.

Anonymous in Canada. All our old alloy goes into the back until we have enough for a load. Surrounded by a fence and motion lights, this is what we found last year after the May 24 weekend! Now it stays near the loading dock.

For over 35 years Charles has worked in the heat treating industry with aerospace companies such as Honeywell in Greer, SC, USA and Goodrich Aerospace in Hodges, NC. Well Charles has just become the Quality Engineer at Bodycote, ADE in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. The Fountain Inn location was originally part of Carolina Commercial which was bought by Bluewater Thermal who then sold the plant to Bodycote a few years back. Since that time the company has made some substantial investments in the facility. By the way the ADE Group of Bodycote is; Aerospace, Defense & Energy and given Charles background in aerospace you can see the fit.

Japanese furnace manufacturer and commercial heat treater Dowa has been in the news recently, mainly because of some issues at their commercial heat treating facility in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA although that is a story which has already been told. Today we look at their newest location which is in North Carolina, USA. Last August the company announced that they would be investing $22.5 million USD into a brand new commercial heat treating operation in Lee County, NC (the official announcement is below).

Our understanding is that work is proceeding as expected and we have an artists rendition of what the facility will look like when finished which is below. We also have a picture from A.W. North Carolina, a local manufacturer of vehicle transmissions for Toyota and the end customer for Dowa for the heat treating side of things. A.W. has 2,200 employees and pushes out 175 transmission per hour for Toyota Camrys and Tundras.

“Dowa Thermotech, a global provider of industrial furnaces and heat protection treatments, will build its first North Carolina plant in Lee County, creating 109 jobs. The Japanese company plans to invest $22.5 million in Sanford with plans to serve clients in the automotive and industrial machinery supply chains.

“Dowa Thermotech is the latest example of an international company choosing North Carolina as the perfect location to do business,” said Gov. Roy Cooper.  “North Carolina competes with the top locations anywhere in the world, thanks to our strong business environment, world-class workforce, and high quality of life.” North Carolina Commerce Secretary Anthony M. Copeland and Ryuji Tsuji, president for Dowa Thermotech, at the announcement of the company’s new plant in Sanford, North Carolina.

Dowa Thermotech, with headquarters in Nagoya, Japan, is a subsidiary of Dowa Holdings Co. Ltd., a global company operating in a wide range of industry sectors including nonferrous metals, metal processing and environmental management and recycling. Dowa Thermotech specializes in the manufacture of industrial furnaces and offers high quality commercial heat treatment services.  The company provides heat protection for metal engine parts, transmissions and other rotating elements that operate in harsh environments.”

Now here is an interesting twist. Michal Mathews worked as a field service engineer for Vacuum Furnace Engineering Ltd., in West Midlands, UK for a couple of years. He enjoyed the vacuum furnace industry so much that he just recently became a Furnace Engineer at UTC Aerospace Systems Telford, Shropshire, United Kingdom. UTC is of course involved in the aerospace industry and is one of the largest vacuum heat treaters in the world.

Recently we at “The Monty” had the chance to visit Chile, largely for pleasure but also partly for business. Based upon that visit we have this brief summary about the captive and commercial heat treatment industry in that country-and it will be brief based upon the amount of heat treating;

There are two commercial heat treaters in the country both based in Santiago. The largest is Tratamientos Térmicos Panamericana Norte which was founded back in 1983. The company is family owned like so many other commercial shops around the world and has roughly 30 employees working 24 hours/day 5 days/week with weekends reserved for overflow work. I am sure it is because of the metal working market in Chile that this is what we would call a “job shop” as opposed to a production shop doing large volume work such as automotive. To take it one step further much of what the company does is related to the main industry in the county which is mining. There is one other much smaller commercial plant which was founded by an ex employee of Tratamientos Térmicos Panamericana Norte offering pretty much the same processes but on a much smaller scale.

The largest captive heat treat in the country is a company by the name of Cormecánica which is wholly owned by French automotive company Renault. At last count this plant had made 3 million gearboxes, every one of which was heat treated in house in one of several batch IQ furnaces. At least one of the mining companies in the country has a reasonably large captive heat treat department consisting of several pit carburizing furnaces but typically the mining companies outsource all their heat treating to the local commercials. We were told that there is a grand total of one vacuum furnace in the country, a large unit built by Italian furnace builder TAV which is used for brazing.

And that as far as we can tell is the limit to heat treating in Chile-we told you it would be a brief report.

As part of our Monday Morning Briefing we had a note about commercial heat treater Thermal Process Holdings (John Hubbard’s group) being poised to expand to almost $200 million USD in annual sales in the very near future.

While we hope that this does prove to be true at some point in time this is not the case now and is merely an “April’s Fools Joke”. This photo shows one of the holdings in the group, P & L Heat Treat in Youngstown, Ohio, USA.

From commercial heat treater Accurate Steel Treating in Southgate, CA, USA we have this mention; “I’m very pleased to announce that Geoff Monti has joined Accurate Steel Treating (AST) as Director of Special Projects and Metallurgy.  Geoff’s initial assignments will include developing and refining best practice heat treating techniques with special emphasis focused on processing Nickel, Stainless and Titanium forgings.  Geoff will act as the technical resource and account manager for these clients.   In this capacity Geoff will be interacting with Quality, Production, and Engineering functions to insure process integrity.   Beyond these assignments Geoff will utilize his vast experience in metallurgy and heat treating to drive continuous improvement in overall plant operations.

Geoff comes to us with 40 years of heat treating and metallurgical experience.  Prior to coming to AST, Geoff spent 10 years at Wyman-Gordon where he started his career as a Product Metallurgist, eventually becoming Chief Metallurgist at the Worchester, MA plant.  He then moved to H&H Heat Treating / Lindberg Heat Treating / Bodycote holding various management and technical positions for 25 years.  He has extensive experience and expertise in Nickel, Titanium and Aluminum Metallurgy and recent accomplishments include acquiring Nadcap approval at Superior Handforge, in Santa Fe Springs, CA where he served as VP of Quality.   Geoff  received a BS degree in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY and has completed 42 course credits towards his master’s degree.  I’m excited that Geoff has joined AST and confident that he will be a valuable resource for our team members and customers. Chris Hall, President – Accurate Steel Treating, Inc.”

Dan McCurdy, President, Bodycote Automotive and General Industrial Heat Treatment, North America and Asia. In our humble opinion Dan is one of the most knowledgeable fellows in the entire worldwide heat treating industry-unfortunately Dan will be retiring May of this year. What we are curious about is who his replacement will be? We have heard several names bandied about but nothing definite yet.  Hot Isostatic Pressing (Hipping) has been in the news quite a bit recently as commercial heat treaters find that this can be a very lucrative technology (read our interview with Jan Soderstrom, CEO of Hipping equipment supplier Quintus Technologies at https://themonty.com/mr-jan-soderstrom-quintus-technologies-interview/).

As a footnote to this story we were approached by Ed Tenerini who in a past life worked for Bodycote in the US, the largest provider of this service in the world. Ed is now a consultant working on his own specializing in Hipping and he has a rather interesting summary of Hipping in North America on his website http://www.globalhipconsultants.com/. A reader from steel supplier Uddeholm sent us this photo of their new facility in Vetlanda, Sweden featuring some real nice looking Ipsen furnaces.

Recently we mentioned a rumor about a “Western” furnace builder being acquired by a Chinese automotive company. Well we still don’t have confirmation on this, the latest rumors say the two companies are still apart on pricing due to reduced margins on the part of the furnace manufacturer. Certainly we can attest to the fact that there are not enormous margins in the new furnace business.  In Canada we have been told that Janusz Petlicki will shortly be retiring. Janusz is a metallurgist who is quite well known in the Canadian captive heat treating industry having worked at TRW, St. Catherines for a number of years and most recently at the Royal Canadian Mint in Winnipeg. On the US west coast we see that Craig Beaumier recently became VP of Sales at Stack Metallurgical the largest commercial heat treater in the US northwest. It’s interesting that Craig used to sell for Quintus Technologies (who are mentioned above) and that Stack just recently ordered a system from Quintus-must be a heck of a salesman.  

Furnace manufacturer SECO/WARWICK sent us this interesting press release; “Leading the way with another industry innovation, SECO/WARWICK has delivered and commissioned the first-ever vacuum purging semi-continuous Active Only® CAB furnace for a North American automotive aftermarket manufacturer. It is their first furnace of any type and simultaneously their largest capital equipment investment to date. The new semi-continuous Active Only® CAB furnace, equipped with vacuum purging in the loading and unloading chamber, is one of its kind in the industry.

It allows for reduction of nitrogen consumption and cost, and it provides extraordinary control of brazing atmosphere quality. This applies in particular to heat exchangers with joints brazed in a closed space. Vacuum purging allows for the perfect removal of oxygen from these spaces before brazing, which cannot be achieved by traditional purging.” And to round things out we see that earlier this year Lee Watson became CEO of Alloy Engineering in Berea, Ohio, USA after a number of years with the company. Alloy Engineering is one of the larger alloy fabricators in the industry and their ad can be found on this page.

There can’t be a captive or commercial heat treater in North America who has not at some point been the victim of “alloy theft”. By alloy theft we mean a few base trays, baskets or muffles disappearing out the back door and turning up at the local scrap yard. Probably because the price of alloy has dropped from their all time peaks a few years back we have not heard much about this recently, however this story caught our eye. Obviously these guys were into this big time.

“A third man has been sentenced and ordered to pay more than $1 million after stealing a metal alloy from ArcelorMittal and selling it. Christopher Forster, 31, of Valparaiso, pleaded guilty last year in federal court to four counts of interstate transportation of stolen property. Forster was sentenced Tuesday to 15 months in prison and was ordered to pay $1,414,030 in restitution to ArcelorMittal, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana. Between 2013 and 2014, Forster and his co-defendants, Ryan Hendrickson and Robert Watkins, stole a metal alloy called Ferro Columbium from ArcelorMittal’s property and transported it across state lines to sell for profit, court records show.

Hendrickson worked for ArcelorMittal in Burns Harbor at the time as a mechanic and welder, and the “nature of his job had him working all over the mill property,” court records state. Hendrickson “passed on that knowledge” to his friend Forster and Watkins and Forster committed the thefts, according to court records. Ferro Columbium is a microalloy used in the heat treating process or as a spray on the hot strip mill, according to Pete Trinidad, union negotiator for ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor. It helps with some specialty steel, including some of the more exotic high-strength steel that ArcelorMittal has developed, Trinidad said.

Watkins was sentenced to 15 months in prison and was ordered to pay $1,291,030 in restitution to ArcelorMittal, court records show. He pleaded guilty to three counts of interstate transportation of stolen property. Hendrickson was sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to pay $123,000 in restitution to ArcelorMittal, court records show. He pleaded guilty to one count of interstate transportation of stolen property.”

Last week we mentioned how ALD Vacuum Technologies (manufacturers of vacuum and vacuum carburizing systems) was going through some major changes. The changes involved their divisions in the USA, Germany and India. In the USA we have been lead to believe that the President of the division in Michigan (which by the way is based in Wixom, Michigan), Mr. Jason Sisler has parted ways with the company. 

In India we hear that ALD Dynatech will change their name to ALD Vacuum Technology and will only offer sales and service with no more furnace manufacturing. And from Germany we have this press release from March 14, 2019; “Guido Lober has been appointed President and Managing Director of AMG Engineering. The management board of AMG Engineering is composed of the President, Christian Momm, Michael Protzammn CTO and Steve Daniels Managing Director, Business Development. Within the AMG Group, AMG Engineering is a company of the new AMG Technologies division established on January 1^st. “2019.”