What you are seeing is a line of vacuum nitriding, tempering and hardening furnaces, 12 in total and all relatively new. Interestingly enough all were built by a company unknown to us, ALBA, an Italian furnace builder whose founders came from a now defunct furnace manufacturer, COFFI again an Italian company.

 

While we are not familiar with ALBA, TTO is quite obviously impressed with their capabilities and certainly to our eyes the equipment appeared to be very impressive.

 

The firm’s president, Mr. Hugo Ferreira told us that while business had been up and down due to COVID, currently it was quite good and that the company was making some substantial investments. One of the reasons he gave us for their business growth was one which we have heard from several heat treaters over the years, including Rochester Steel Treating in Rochester, NY, USA of all places. Basically Hugo stated they would always turn a customers work around in 24 hours or less even if it meant running a furnace at far less than capacity. Yes this means a loss to the firm on one particular job but on the other side of the coin it means extremely loyal customers. Interesting that heat treaters as far apart as Portugal and New York State should have the same philosophy.

 

We will continue with our “Heat Treating Portugal” series this week along with some other news items including a very interesting interview with the “Great” Don Longenette.

 

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