More Manufacturers Bringing Heat Treat In-House-Comments
Friday, March 28th, 2025 we had an article entitled; “More Manufacturers Bringing Heat Treat In-House?” The article by “Mr. Marco Baretti, Sales Area Manager, TAV VACUUM FURNACES SPA” proved to be of a great deal of interest to a number of our readers, as an example on LinkedIn alone it has garnered close to 3,000 views.
As you would expect it did provoke a number of responses generally agreeing with the hypothesis although some individuals weren’t as convinced.
We had a very interesting comment from Mr. Richard Burslem, a longtime metallurgist who has worked with commercial heat treater “Wallwork” in the UK for many years now-his comments are below;
“A very interesting and complex subject Gord, thank you for opening up the discussion. I have been in the metal heat treatment industry over 45 years and find there is no “one size fits all” answer. My experience is that the number of customers shutting their in-house heat treatment far outweighs the number bringing it in house. The main reasons are: cost of running and repairs, loss of skills and increased complexity of the materials to be processed. Contracting out your heat treatment usually makes sense, it is also a highly competitive business so there is a lot of pressure on service and pricing, if you don’t get it right then your competitor will!Vacuum furnaces ‘feel’ a bit more like manufacturing equipment: no flames, no visible hot metal, no open oil baths and no smoke. Like all heat treatment kit, they are great at doing some jobs and useless at others. You can see the attraction if you have a suitable product to treat. What people seem to gloss over though is the complex nature and high cost of maintenance and special skills required.
As a final thought, we have bought several vacuum furnaces second hand from customers who installed them in their own factories and couldn’t justify them after a few years.”
From Mr. Takis Gardelis, UK Operations Manager (ADE) at Bodycote we have these thoughts;
“This strategy comes under questioning when sustainability parameters are taken into account. As the demand for de-carbonisation will start driving policy more and more and the tax incentives will become credits, I believe these internal investments will not pay dividend. More and more shareholders are pushing for sustainable strategies in order to be convinced to invest their money. Investing in in-house capability of non core activities to save short term cost pressures from the energy sector will not deliver ROI expected. Let’s see what happens the next 5-10 years.”Did you like this article? Click here to subscribe to The Monty.
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