Tratamientos Térmicos Panamericana Norte/Santiago, Chile

We were very fortunate earlier this week to be able to visit the largest commercial heat treater in Chile, a company by the name of Tratamientos Térmicos Panamericana Norte located in Santiago which was founded back in 1983. The company is family owned like so many other commercial shops around the world and has roughly 30 employees working 24 hours/day 5 days/week with weekends reserved for overflow work. I am sure it is because of the metal working market in Chile that this is what we would call a “job shop” as opposed to a production shop doing large volume work such as automotive. To take it one step further much of what the company does is related to the main industry in the county which is mining.

What we saw was a great deal of equipment dedicated to tempering, annealing and stress relieving along with the ability to offer salt nitriding, austempering and martempering, basically a strong emphasis of salt. Having said that we had some very in depth conversations about their future furnace requirements all of which are very high tech. Outside of the commercial heat treat industry it would appear that the largest captive in the country is a company by the name of Cormecánica wholly owned by Renault which has made at last count 3 million gearboxes and has an in house heat treating department which consists of several batch IQ furnaces. These photos give you a good idea about the company.

From left to right; Silvano Casagrande, Giuseppe Casagrande, Alberto Hidalgo, Maurizio Moschini, Pedro Vidal, Federico Parissenti, Hector Olivera, Gord Montgomery