Phoenix Heat Treat Gives “The Monty Heat Treat News” a Tour

As previously mentioned commercial heat treater Phoenix Heat Treat gave “The Monty Heat Treat News” a 5 star tour of their facility this past Friday, a tour which we have been looking forward to. As the largest commercial heat treater between San Diego, CA and Dallas, Texas, USA we were anticipating a fairly large facility with a number of processes and we were not disappointed with what we saw.

Founded in 1963 by the grandfather of the current President, Mr. Pete Hushek the company now has 67 employees and a very substantial facility. Arizona is not known for a large manufacturing base which means Phoenix (NADCAP accredited by the way) by necessity offers a wide variety of thermal processing capabilities including aluminum heat treating, carburizing, gas nitriding, vacuum hardening, annealing, austempering and martempering-have we forgotten anything? If so the full list is available at Phoenix Heat Treating – Quick Quote – We provide tighter process control with higher quality at lower costs (phoenix-heat-treating.com)

What is striking about the company is the knowledge which has been passed along through several generations of Huskeks. In 3 hours of speaking with Pete we learned more heat treat industry tricks than we have learned in the past 5 years. A phrase which he used caught our attention as something we should remember it goes like this; “Metal is not very smart but it has a mind of its own in terms of its characteristics which means you have to trick the metal into doing what you want”-Pete went on to use some very interesting examples which could only come from years of experience. Pete’s son Charlie who is General Manager has quite obviously absorbed this knowledge from his father.

Phoenix is currently on a very strong growth curve which includes recent additions such as a larger drop bottom oven installation for processing aluminum, another very exciting addition which the firm is looking at includes-well we will have to leave that for a future date.

When we quizzed Pete and Charlie about what they see in the future for heat treating they were unanimous in saying that additive manufacturing is creating some very exciting opportunities, opportunities which are still being explored. Charlie added that he has always felt that the heat treatment industry is too secretive in terms of the processing and that more transparency in the industry would benefit both manufacturers and commercial heat treaters a sentiment which we would agree with.

All in all a fascinating facility and one well worth visiting. We hope these photos and some additional ones tomorrow do justice to the company.  Gord & Dale Montomery

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 Charlie & Pete Hushek, Dale Montgomery (The Monty Heat Treat News)

Charlie & Peter Hushek

  Gord Montgomery, Pete Hushek (President PHT),  Derek Chomczyk (Production Manager, PHT), Charlie Hushek (General Manager, PHT)