Each year “The Monty Heat Treat News” puts together a list of the largest and most impressive single location, captive (in-house) heat treats in North America (the list and our criteria to be considered can be found at https://themonty.com/project/15-largest-captive-heat-treats-north-america/). 

It is interesting to note that 3 of the locations on this list are represented by Dana Inc., facilities, 2 in Mexico and 1 in Lafayette, Indiana, USA-it is the Indiana facility which is our focus today. Just last week Gord Montgomery of “The Monty Heat Treat News” had the chance to visit this location for the first time and what we found was very impressive. (At this point I would like to thank my hosts, Bryce Tanner, Manufacturing Engineering Project Manager, Aaron Flesher, Metallurgist and Zenah Baker, Control Metallurgist).

Our experience with visiting Dana facilities over the years lead us to think of large volume auto and truck components. However this location is quite a bit different, we will let Dana summarize this facility.

“Dana Fairfield® engineers, manufactures, tests, certifies, and supplies precision-made gears and gear drives for an expansive range of industrial and mobile applications.” https://www.fairfieldmfg.com/ 

The result is that the facility can be considered High Mix/Low Volume in that typical orders might be 100-200 high precision gears which are destined for such various industries as agriculture, oil & gas, power generation and defense. 

There is no way to describe the heat treat department other than by saying it is mammoth. 80,000 square feet houses 7 two row pusher furnace lines, a large roller hearth hardening line, 2 annealers, 7 batch IQ furnaces, 2 nitriders, 5 induction hardeners (scanning and tooth to tooth), 4 pit carburizing furnaces, 6 endothermic generators and 21 press quench systems. Datalogging and state of the art controls round out the picture of this clean heat treat.

In terms of capabilities the company can process gears up to 36” in diameter, with a weight of up to 900 pounds, shafts up to 2,000 pounds while the Induction systems can handle up to an 80” internal diameter. 

In summary anybody with an interest and knowledge of in-house heat treating would find this a fascinating tour and after our visit we have no doubt but that Dana, Lafayette, Indiana deserves to be on our list of “The 15 Largest Single Location Heat Treats in North America”. 

Gears Prior to Processing through a two row pusher furnace.

Press Quenching

Heat Treat Department