Laser heat treating represents a miniscule portion of the heat treating market but it is one that we run across from time so it was with great interest that Gord Montgomery of “The Monty Heat Treat News” recently visited a company in Clinton Township, Michigan, USA who offers laser heat treating.

Synergy Additive Manufacturing LLC is a company that specializes in Laser heat treating and provides equipment and services for this process. It was founded in 2017 and has roughly 10 employees.  In addition to laser heat treating and building the equipment itself they also offer laser cladding for remanufacturing. This is all focused on the oil and gas, aerospace, marine, and precision machine tool industries. 

It would appear that the main advantage of laser heat treating is that it is extremely localized which translates into very little distortion. A perfect example which we witnessed are stamping dies. As most of the die does not require heat treating the laser process is able to very accurately target the areas which do require hardening leaving the rest of the die seeing little heat and consequently no distortion. While the cost is higher than typical heat treating the additional costs are more than compensated for by the fact that there is reduced machining.   

We don’t anticipate laser heat treating taking over the industry any time soon but we can see that in some applications it has definite advantages and we would expect that we will run across the technology on a more regular basis going forward.  These photos show a typical system heat treating an automotive stamping die.

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