Monday Morning Briefing

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.