An interesting finding popped up during our search to find the 10 largest single location captive heat treaters in North America and that finding is vacuum carburizing. We knew setting out that the largest would be heavily weighted in favor of automotive suppliers, what we didn`t realize was how significant the amount of vacuum carburizing (LPC) was-lets give you some brief background.

The history of vacuum carburizing is a long and distinguished one where it has found the most acceptance was in the heat treatment of automotive transmission gears. We have long considered Stackpole (a powdered metal supplier of gears) to be the first North American company to really capitalize on this and that is almost 30 years ago (incidentally the company still has a substantial VC department at their location in Canada). Since those beginnings the technology has grown substantially, especially in gear applications and the final result is what we are seeing today in our initial suggestions for the largest, single location captive heat treaters in North America.

We won`t keep you in suspense; Initial research shows that each of these three locations will probably end up on our list of the largest-note that all 3 produce automotive transmission components;

• GKN Driveline, Newton, NC, USA
• Ford, Sharonville, Ohio, USA
• ZF Transmissions, Newton, NC, USA

Without offering too many details we can say that each has over 30 VC chambers are related furnaces. Stay tuned.

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