Heat TreatRadiohost and Heat TreatToday publisher, Doug Glenn, talks with Matt Wright, the chief marketing officer at C3 Data, to hear how the company has reimagined furnace compliance to fit in your pocket.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn: Matt, Welcome to Heat TreatRadio. This is your first time on.
Matt Wright: It’s good to be with you.
DG: I do want you to spend a little bit of time giving our listeners a little bit about your background and then, also, if you don’t mind, a quick summary of what C3 Data does, just so our listeners have a concept.
MW: I’ve been in the heat treat industry now for about 15 years. My brother, Nathan, and I together, we own a few — twenty-five — accredited pyrometry labs. C3 Data really comes as an outgrowth of that. Looking for an opportunity or way to reduce errors, a human element, and to save time with all of our technicians doing all the work that they’re doing. And so, it really became something that we did for ourselves and realized that it could be something that the industry as a whole could use.
When you look at our industry, there are two ways that you can comply with the AMS2750 CQI-9 specifications. One is what I would call the “roll your own method” which is what everyone has been doing from the beginning: that is using a whole panoply of different technologies, whether that’s an Excel spreadsheet, a clipboard, post-it notes, or what have you — anything and everything that you can do to try to remember to do all the things that need to be done, and then you go to the audit and hope that nothing fell through the cracks. What C3 Data does is takes all of those requirements and starts with the spec and encapsulates everything in one platform, one system, so you don’t have to think about and remember to do those things, you just follow what we have you do, and you come out and you’re ready for your audit.
DG: I want to jump back onto the labs you were talking about. Very briefly, how many where are they?
MW: We’ve got one in Ohio and one in Mexico that has three different offices in Mexico.
DG: And these are metallurgical labs, or did you say testing labs?
MW: They are labs that go on site to perform temperature uniformity surveys, system accuracy tests, instrument calibrations and those types of things.
DG: Let’s talk about compliance. Compliance with AMS2750 CQI-9 NADCAP is really an issue that is important to a lot of our listeners and readers, primarily those manufacturers who have their own in-house heat treat and have their own furnaces. Let’s talk about some of the latest developments, the latest technologies in that field. What are you seeing out there, Matt?
MW: When I look at our industry, one of the things that is the biggest challenge is the flow of information — getting information from where it resides to where it needs to be in the format that it needs to be. I think the technologies that have been successful in our industry are technologies that help lubricate that flow, if you will. A good example, I think you had mentioned some of the specs, but one of them is ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations specifications. In that case, you’re trying to prevent information from going to malign influence and so they’re going to use things like the Cloud and mobile technology. And those are the platforms that we’ve been built on, as well. But we’re kind of using it in reverse; we’re trying to disseminate information and getting it there as quickly as possible. So, the Cloud and mobile technology, I think, are the two biggest forms of technology that have been really helpful.
A couple other ones that we’re actually using that we’re seeing a little bit more and more of is OCR- optical character recognition. This is the ability to take a static document that has information on it and digitize it and get it to where it needs to be. We’re using that to be able to scan, for example, thermocouple cert, so that our customers, irrespective of who they’re buying their certs from, can just take a cert, scan it and build it right into their platform so they can use it to do an SAT in real-time.
Another one is the QR code. You know, with the things that are going on, it’s kind of made a comeback in recent days. Now you can get your wine list by scanning a QR code at the restaurant. Well, we’ve been using it since before it was cool to do that; we’ve been using to scan your thermocouples or your field test instrumentation, so you don’t have to go and look up something in a database or a table, you can just scan it in and, boom, you’re ready to go.
DG: This OCR is interesting regarding the certifications on the thermocouples. So, a thermocouple comes in, it’s got its stats and whatever you’re scanning, that becomes part of your data, if you will, correct? And are they using it for anything else? For example, I’m thinking in my mind, a company who wants to transition over to using a system like yours, perhaps they’ve got a lot of historical documents that, at least, would be helpful. Is that also an application?
MW: Certainly, a potential application could exist for that. We’ve got other tools with forms and things that we’ve put in place to make that transition from going from, what I call the “roll your own” in the static thing and pulling all of that information in. We’ve really made it, and strive to make it, more and more seamless every time.
DG: And the QR codes? Are you using those on furnaces, on thermocouples, or where are you using those?
MW: Any equipment that you use, whether it’s a thermocouple, a field test instrument, a data logger, any certification data that is associated with that, you can print a QR code and affix it to that. You’re not having to go and enter that in manually, you’re just scanning it in using our mobile app that has a QR code scanner built right in — it’s pulling that directly in. The whole idea is to reduce that bottle neck, if you will, and to get that information flow in so that these guys can do more value at a time out on the plant floor.
DG: I also wanted to ask you, because you mentioned about Cloud-based and mobile apps and things of that sort — let’s talk about security for just a second. I just got done doing an interview with a guy by the name of Mark Mills that hasn’t been released yet. He’s a fascinating guy and I’m going to give that one a plug right here- you need to listen to that when it comes out. But he was talking about cybersecurity- he wrote a book called The Cloud Revolution. I’ve also heard at some of the industry meetings that there have been real concerns where some of the larger companies are not wanting their data to go “outside,” if you will- they don’t want to break the ceiling and get into the Cloud, they want it on site. Are you guys seeing much of that? If so, how are you handling that?
MW: It’s a mix. We do see that. Every corporation has their own policies and procedures and what they’ve determined is a safe way to operate. So, on one side of the spectrum, we’ll get people that will be concerned and say, “Nothing in the Cloud,” and we have to have that conversation. Usually, the conversation revolves around what is the purpose of this information? And really, when you peel back and look at it, if someone were able to access the information in our system (which we have very tight security around), the only thing they’re going to find out is the very thing that those same preparations are bragging about on their website, and that is that they’re NADCAP compliant. There is no process-related data, there is no secret sauce involved in anything that we’re doing and so, it’s not something that we believe, and most people do end up seeing it our way that needs to be curtailed from a Cloud perspective.
DG: I know a lot of companies’ concerns are not so much that something will get out about them as it is this Cloud connection is a gateway for the nefarious amongst us to break in and get it. I’m sure you’re seeing that, right? Let me ask you it this way: What percentage of your clients are actually saying to you, “Listen, we want this to not be Cloud-based, we want it to be just on-site.”
MW: If I could swag, I would say maybe 5–10% ask the question, “Hey, is this something that we can just have locally because we would just like to have it for ourselves?” And the answer is, it’s not; it’s not something that we can have locally, just by nature of what it is — it’s an ongoing, continually improving and updated thing.
DG: Let’s talk about another hot point that we have here besides internet security. I don’t know if you guys have been affected by this, but it has to do with supply chain issues. We’ve got Covid to blame, we’ve got Russia to blame, we’ve got all kinds of things as far as supply chain. Are you experiencing any of that yourself for your business or are you seeing it from any of your customers?
MW: I think we are fairly isolated from that in that we’re not producing a tangible product; we’re a software company. Happily, we’re not experiencing that so much. I will say that, from our customers’ perspective, the big catchphrase now is “flexibility.” With those things that you mentioned, the ability to be able to adapt to not knowing from one day to the next if the guy that was supposed to do your SATs or TUSs today is even going to show up because he might test positive for Covid, or something else, really drives home the need to be flexible — to not put all your eggs in one proverbial basket. We’re striving asymptotically, if you will, to get closer and closer to that point where someone who’s never done a calibration before, can pick up an app and literally, the same day, start doing calibrations. There are a lot of hills to climb and obstacles to overcome, but we’re pretty close and we’re going to strive to keep doing that so that people don’t have to worry about what if this guy quits, or what if this guy gets a promotion? The system is going to run, and they can pick up and run with it with the next guy.
DG: When we talk supply chain, I start to think to myself, to a certain extent, I start to think internationally a little bit because a lot of the issues are bottlenecks at the border and things of that sort. But it makes me wonder — how about you guys, C3 Data, are you just North America or are you seeing business outside?
MW: Being a software company, one of the benefits of it is that you don’t have to ship anything anywhere. Being a U.S.-based company, we started out here and most of customers are here. We have a fair number of customers in Mexico, we have a few in the United Kingdom and we’re expanding currently, bringing on customers in France. Right now, we’ve got about four or five different languages that the website and the app is translated into, and we’re interested in expanding. It’s a great question and one that we’re really excited about — being able to not just be so parochial in the United States, but to expand into Europe.
DG: Tell me a bit about the mobile app. Let’s say you’re a manufacturer and you’ve got an in-house heat treat department. How often are you going to be using that mobile app as opposed to how often are you going to be using a desktop application, and how is the mobile app used?
MW: The decision to go with the mobile app came from our experience as a heat treat lab. Having to schlep around a laptop in a laptop bag or a cart with a computer on it, it’s really kind of a pain, quite frankly. Virtually everyone owns a cellphone. So, if we can put this into the power of a cellphone and enable that person to carry one less thing and to have the flexibility to not need to have to have that to do an SAT, to do a calibration, to change a sensor and those types of things, that’s what we wanted to do. You can use the app, you can run it on a laptop if you wish, and we have a few customers that just do that, but most of our customers (I would say over 90%), use the app, and depending on how fat their fingers are, they might go to a tablet.
DG: On a typical day when they’re using the app, they’re using it to do what? Run us through what would be a typical application.
MW: The mobile is primarily just used to do instrument calibrations and system accuracy tests. When you go out to do these tests, there is a whole lot of information that you need to have, and you need to be able to record information. Everything that you need is on the app, whether it’s defining what test sensor you’re using, what field test instrument you’re using, what furnace class the furnace is — everything is there. So, they’re using it just to record information. As they’re using that app and putting that information in, their reports are literally being generated in real-time and waiting for the quality manager to review whenever he or she wants to.
DG: I wanted to ask you about the different standards that you guys are covering. The three biggies we always think about are NADCAP, AMS2750, and CQI-9, and I’m sure you’ve got compliance with all of those. Are there any other major ones that you think any of our captive heat treaters might be interested in? I know the commercials will be interested in all of them, but any our captives might be interested in?
MW: Yes. Those two are the big ones — the AMS2750 spec and CQI-9 — that’s going to cover your aerospace and your automotive specification. We have the ability to give our customers, and a lot of our users do take advantage of it to create their own custom specs. They can just define their custom specs, their criteria, their frequencies, and then use the same platform that we built for these two specs, out of the box, to drive the compliance to whatever spec they want. So, it’s very open — it’s kind of agnostic in that regard. But we just built in those two AMS2750 and CQI-9 specs because that’s going to hit over 90% of what everybody wants.
Just a thing about those specs: Whenever those specs revise, like when CQI-9 went from rev 3 to 4 and when AMS2750 revision from E to F, and now, coming up in June when it revises to G, one of the benefits of having a Cloud-based solution is that all of our customers, when it went to F, all they had to do was log into the portal, find their furnace and go from E and select F and they’re off and running. That’s all they had to do. No training is required. It saves a lot on time of training, and you don’t have to redo the paperwork. The reports and all those things are now current revision.
DG: And Rev G of AMS2750 is probably out. I was just at some industry meetings and the big stink about the AMS2750 is going to a tenth of a degree on some measuring tools and things of that sort. Are you guys are able to handle that? I assume, being the software guys, it probably doesn’t really matter to you whether it’s a tenth or a hundredth or whatever. But you can cover that?
MW: Yes, absolutely. Now the tenth of a degree thing, I believe, is going to be extended for another year so that users are going to have one more year for that. The date we’re hearing and looking at is the end of June, so I think June 29th, which I think is the two-year anniversary of Rev E to F, so it will be coming out then, if nothing else changes.
DG: The fellows I was hearing from were saying basically there is talk of the extension, but they’ve got to get it passed to actually get the extension, otherwise end of June is the date that most people are going to have to nail that with.
Your C3 Data tool is basically Cloud-based, portable, whether it’s website, phone, tablet or whatever, to help people comply. When the auditor walks in to get the information they want, how easy is it for your clients? What do they need to do? I assume this is where the real time and money-savings come in, correct?
MW: Correct. What we like to tell people is, in a nutshell, C3 Data is going to save you time and help you pass your audits. The time saving is happening all during the year. Every SAT you do, you’re saving an enormous amount of time because you’re not writing in your reports, you’re not doing any calculations — you’re aggregating and gaining time throughout the year.
You’re also going to gain time in your audit preparation because, as you mentioned, when you log into your portal, your ability to find all of your documentation, along with our furnace dashboard which shows you, furnace by furnace, the compliance status of each one of them. You can see, in real-time, the compliance status is a huge timesaver and a real peace of mind that you can walk in with your hand on your heart and know from the auditor’s perspective, you’re going to have a good experience, because if he wants to see something, it’s very easy to find and you’re well prepared.
DG: Timesaving has got to be enormous. I know there are a lot of companies investing a lot of time in these audits and in compliance-related things.
You guys do a lot of work in this area. Are there any good tools out there for any of our viewers/readers if they want to go and find out more information, whether it’s dealing with compliance, what is AMS2750, what is CQI-9, any of that kind of thing? Any suggestions from you on where people might want to go?
MW: On our website, c3data.com, we’ve got a portion there that you can look up for training. We have a curriculum of training courses where they can come and educate themselves, whether it’s, like you say, to learn about what the spec is or maybe take a deeper dive into some of those fields — we have those available. We love talking to our customers and our prospects, too.
One of the things I will mention: In going back to the web as a software service model, one of the things that’s ongoing is the ability to support. We’ve been through so many of these audits and we know the spec probably more than the next guy and when you look at some of the testimonials on our website, you’ll see that they obviously love the product, but they love the ability to call one of us, and if we don’t know the answer, we’ll find out the answer and get them plugged into what they need. We enjoy talking about it.
This year, we’re going to be at the Furnace North America show in Indianapolis which is my hometown which will make it quite easy for me to get there. But we’re going to have a special guest, Doug Shuler, who’s going to be joining us at our booth. So come on by the booth and get all your questions answered by Doug.
DG: If his name is Doug, he can’t be all bad.
Matt, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys continue to grow and you’re offering a great service to heat treaters, so best of luck to you.
Heat TreatRadiohost, Doug Glenn, talks with Greg Steiger of Idemitsu Lubricants America Corp. about the causes and dangers of water in your quench tank, how to know if you have too much, and what to do about it if you do. This highly-informative episode is a must watch/listen for those who oil quench.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn (DG): Greg, welcome to Heat TreatRadio. This is the first time you’ve been on, and I know we’ve talked about doing this for quite a while, so, welcome!
Greg Steiger (GS): Thank you, it’s my pleasure.
DG: I asked the question, before we hit the record button, but I think we need to ask the question again: The big white flag in the background with the W, you need to tell us about that.
GS: That’s the flag that they fly outside of Wrigley Field every time the Cubs win. They’ve been doing this for almost a century so that way when they were only playing day baseball and you could come home on the L, you could see if the Cubs won or lost without looking at a box score.
DG: That’s great! Now, you are not in the Chicago area, are you?
GS: No, I’m in the Columbia, SC area, but I was born and raised in the Chicago area.
DG: So, you’re a Cubby fan.
GS: I am.
DG: Being from Pittsburgh, I forgive you for that.
So, Greg, first thing, can you give our listeners and viewers a brief background about yourself and then we’ll jump into the water topic, so to speak?
GS: Sure. I got into this industry when I graduated from college in 1984 as a formulating chemist. I eventually worked my way into, what we call, customer service or tech service, where I’d go out and visit customers, run product trials if customers had problems. I worked my way into laboratory management and eventually sales and marketing. I’ve been at Idemitsu for the past 9 years. Since I’ve been at Idemitsu, I’ve earned a master’s degree in materials engineering, and I’ve learned a lot about heat treat and it’s really become my passion. I am currently the market segment leader for heat treat products for Idemitsu.
DG: I should congratulate you on that degree, by the way. I know a year or so ago, you were still working on that, so that’s great!
GS: May 6th I graduate.
DG: Tell us, just briefly, for those who might not know about Idemitsu. We can see it on your shirt but tell us about them a little bit, so people have a sense.
GS: Idemitsu is a very well-kept secret here in the U.S. They are actually the 8th largest oil company in the world. We are a Japanese owned company. There is about an 85-90% chance that no matter what vehicle you drive, you’ve got some of our fluids in it. The largest market share is the automotive air conditioning compressor market, but basically, if you drive a Honda, Mazda, Subaru, or Toyota, it left the plant with our engine oils, our transmission fluids in it at the factory.
When it comes to quench oils on the industrial side, Idemitsu is actually the 2nd largest quench oil provider in the world. Even though we’re Japanese, all of our heat products, in general, are made and blended here in the U.S.; we don’t import anything from Japan for our heat treat products.
DG: Very interesting. So, a big company — somebody worth paying attention to, I think is the point. You’re right — it’s the best kept secret. We’re trying to work to not make it so secret.
GS: We’re doing what we can, Doug.
DG: This next question I’m going to ask you is very, very basic and most people listening I’m sure will know this but there may be some who don’t: Why is water in quench oil a problem?
GS: A little bit of water is not a problem because it will happen naturally through condensation, but when you start to get too much water in there, a couple of things happen. Our research has shown that basically about 200-250 ppm water, you start to get uneven cooling.
A quench oil is not a completely homogenous fluid; it’s possible to have water in one area of the tank and no water in the other so you can get different cooling speeds in different areas of the tank. When you start getting up to large amounts of water, somewhere around 750 ppm to over 1000 ppm, it becomes a safety issue. What happens is — when water turns into steam, it actually expands. Most things when they get warmer, they contract, but water is the opposite — it expands. It expands 1600 times at boiling and the hotter the steam gets, the more it expands.
"A little bit of water is not a problem because it will happen naturally through condensation, but when you start to get too much water in there, a couple of things happen. Our research has shown that basically about 200-250 ppm water, you start to get uneven cooling."
Think of it: If you have a gallon of water in a 3,000-gallon quench tank, when you boil that water, it turns into 1600 gallons of steam, and it’s got nowhere to go but up and out of the quench oil and it’s going to carry the quench oil with it onto flame curtains, other hotspots on the furnace, and that’s why it becomes so dangerous.
DG: It’s really the risk of explosion, in a sense. That’s basically what we’re talking about. I could be wrong, but my gut feeling is that a vast majority of quench fires are started because of water that happened or simply the product not getting down into the quench fast enough. But a lot of it is caused by carrying water in with the part.
GS: Not necessarily on the part but being in the oil itself through various means. As I said, it happens naturally every time you heat an oil up and you cool it down, you get condensation, but that’s usually only a few parts per million, and every time you drop a load in, you’re driving that water off.
DG: Right. Raising up the temperature and therefore boiling off the water.
GS: Right.
DG: This is a follow-up question into what we were just talking about, and maybe we’ve answered it: Where does the water come from? Is it typically just condensation or what are the top ways water gets into the tank?
GS: Condensation is something we can’t prevent because we live in a hot, humid environment. But what we can prevent is human error, and that’s where most of the water comes from. For instance, if a heat treater has their quench oil stored outside, perhaps in totes — it’s particularly important to make sure that the caps and lids on these totes or drums are very tight and secure because otherwise they’ll get condensation in there and rainwater in there.
We’ve seen instances where people are working on a furnace, and they will hit the sprinkles and the sprinklers will set off and put water into the quench oil. Heat treat furnace doors and, not so much anymore but, heat exchanges where water cooled. Anything that is under pressure is eventually going to leak and that’s why you see companies going to air-cooled heat exchangers. It’s still more difficult to get that air-cooled door and there is still some water in those doors. Like I say, anything under pressure is eventually going to leak and that’s where you see some of the water infiltration, as well.
DG: Typically speaking, how warm or how cool is the oil in a quench tank? You mentioned about condensation being caused by when it cools down, you’re going to have some condensation in there. Where do we run those tanks?
GS: It depends on if you’re using a hot oil or a cold oil. A cold oil is basically an oil that you add some heat to get it around 130-160 F, then you use your heat exchangers to keep taking the heat away when you quench the load in there. A hot oil you add heat to constantly because you want to keep that typically 250-300 F. In a hot oil, you really don’t have a lot of issues with water, unless the furnace goes down and then you get a lot more condensation than anything else. Now, cold oil, you have issues with water because you’re not above the evaporation point of the water.
DG: The bottom line is: If you’ve got too much water in the quench tank, it’s an issue.
Tell us about the measurement. How do we know if we’ve got water in there, and how do we know how much we have?
GS: Well, there are some portable test kits out there. The ones I’m familiar with are made by the Hach Company. You can purchase these from industrial supply houses like McMaster-Carr or places like that. They will give you ppm’s of water.
You heard a lot of old-timers always talk about crackle tests. That is not an effective way to determine how much water is in there. Our studies have shown that you can get as much as 1000-1500 ppm of water before that oil starts to crackle. The way you run a crackle test is — you take a hot panel, (that’s hotter than the boiling point of water), put a couple of drops of oil on it and if it crackles, there is water in there. Sometimes, the oil is so thick, it doesn’t really crackle, and you can’t see it until you get too much water in there.
The way all quench oil providers do it in their lab is something called a Karl Fischer titration. This is not something that the typical heat treater would have in their lab — it’s a relatively expensive piece of equipment. We use automated ones because we do so many at a time, but you can buy manual ones, if you’d like, and those are a little bit less expensive, but again, you’re talking about laboratory equipment and you’re talking about thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of dollars.
Another way to determine if you have water in your quench oil, especially on lighter colored quench oils, is to take a flashlight, put it in a clear beaker, and take a flashlight and put that flashlight at the bottom of the beaker. If nothing in that beaker is hazy and everything is very clear and amber and you can see through it, chances are there is no water in it. But if it’s a dark quench oil, like a lot of cold oils are where it’s almost jet black, the flashlight won’t do you any good.
One of our customers has talked about using a paste. Unfortunately, I don’t know the manufacturer of it, but what he did is he took a paste and put it on a wooden stick and stirred it all throughout its tank. The paste didn’t turn colors, so he knew there was no water in it. To prove that the paste was still good, he actually licked a finger and put it onto the paste and the past turned pink.
DG: This paste that you put on the stick, it doesn’t dissolve into the liquid — it’s just testing whether there is water there. And if it changes color, then you’ve got water. We’ll have to find out what that is and maybe we can put a note about that on the screen.
DG: Probably the best, most reasonable method that doesn’t cost so much, is maybe getting one of those testing kits. Do you have suggestions, Greg, on how frequently a heat treater ought to be checking his or her tank for water?
GS: I would say weekly. I don’t think it needs to be tested any more unless you think there’s a problem. If there’s a problem, obviously, test as often as you need to. But weekly is good enough.
Again, when you’re dropping a load into quench oil, you’re anywhere from 1300-1800 F, so when you drop that load in, you’re driving almost all of the water off that would be in the quench oil from condensation. It’s just if you’re worried about some sort of a human error, that’s when you want to take more frequent testing.
DG: So, it’s going to be somewhat dependent on your process.
How about the material that you are quenching? Are some materials more sensitive to water than others, or is not really an issue?
GS: Not really. It’s more of an issue of part geometry. And that goes really for distortion and cracking along with the water. A little bit of water can crack a very thin part, but on a very thick part, it may not have much effect at all.
DG: How about cosmetics? I know that some people are very concerned with cosmetics. Is water in the quench oil going to cause any issue with cosmetics, such as spotting?
GS: Short-term no, long-term yes. What causes a lot of stains is oxidation. Water, when it heats up, will actually dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen won’t oxidize the oil, but the oxygen does. That’s one of the reasons why heat treaters use flame curtains — not to allow the oxygen from the atmosphere into the furnace. At the temperatures that you heat treat at, it doesn’t take much oxygen presence to oxidize not only the parts, but also the oil.
DG: We talked briefly about why water is a problem. We talked about measuring it and trying to determine if you have an issue. Let’s move on to this: Ok, we’ve got water in the quench and it’s at an unacceptable level. What do we do?
GS: There are a few ways to do it. It really depends on what level of water you’re at, how safe you feel, and how soon do you need that furnace. Many furnaces have a bottom drain. If you turn the agitation off in the quench oil, the water is going to be heavier and denser than the oil and it will sink to the bottom. This is going to take a couple of days, at least. If you’re looking at 1000 ppm or so, this is probably the best way to do it, because then you can drain from the bottom of the tank until you no longer see water coming off and you see oil.
Let’s say you’ve got 500 ppm or 400. We recommend an upper limit of 200. For that you can run some scrap through your furnace. Again, you have to be incredibly careful because you’re not really at what would be an explosive level, but you don’t want to run good parts through there because you may get some strange hardness results — they may be higher in hardness than what you’re expecting.
Another way, (again, this will take some time), is to actually bring the temperature of your oil above the boiling point of water. If you brought it up to about 220 degrees or so, as the oil starts to evaporate, you will see bubbles and a froth (almost like a head you would see on a beer) come to the top of the oil tank. Once that’s gone, chances are your water is gone.
The last thing you can do is do a complete dump, drain, and recharge. But I would caution anybody who suspects that they have water in their quench oil, and you want to do any of this testing — before you run any loads through that furnace (with good parts), make sure you send a sample overnight to your quench oil provider and they can test it for you. That’s the biggest issue.
DG: I want to back up because you said something that I didn’t catch the fullness of, I don’t think. You said one of the solutions was to simply run scrap parts through your furnace?
GS: Yes.
DG: Now, how does that help you eliminate the water?
GS: Again, you’re taking these scrap parts and they come through your furnace and the furnace may be 1800-2200 degrees. When you dump that load into the quench, if you’ve got just a small amount of excess water, it will evaporate off.
DG: Gotcha. You’re basically bringing up the temperature of the oil so that the water evaporates.
GS: Exactly. You’re almost flashing it off.
DG: We talked about the draining and the replacing. I know of some companies recycle their oil. Any thoughts or comments about that that heat treaters ought to be aware?
GS: Yes, because that’s also a potential source of contamination for water because they skim the oil off of their cleaner tanks. I’ve been at a lot of heat treaters where they have these reclamation systems — they heat the oil up, theoretically they drive all the water off, but not always. Again, this is part of that human error. As a quench oil company, we understand that our customers are doing this, especially with oil continuing to go up. But, again, working with your quench oil supplier here is key because we’ll analyze the samples for our customers and tell them if they’re getting all that water off. Obviously, it’s in the quench oil supplier’s best interest, and the customer’s best interest, to make sure everybody is safe. If a plant burns down, nobody wins.
DG: We’ve discussed why water is a problem, how we measure it to make sure we know it, and then what to do with it. Being a quench expert, do you have any other resources, if someone was interested in learning more, whether it be specifically about water in quench oil or just other quench resources — is there anything that you can recommend for further reading?
GS: I wrote a series of articles on quench oil and how to get water out of the quench oil for your publication Heat Treat Today. Also, how to use your analysis from your quench oil supplier to operate your furnace. You should always let the data tell you how to operate a furnace and not do something just because we’ve always done it this way.
Others, such as Scott Mackenzie, have presented papers. I know back in 2018, there was a conference Thermal Processing in Motion by ASM, and he presented a paper there on how to get rid of water out of quench oil.
DG: Any other resources you’d like to recommend to people?
GS: Use your quench oil supplier. They are the experts. They’re the ones that have all of the testing equipment you need and use them as a resource. Quite frankly, if you don’t get the service from your current quench oil supplier, there are a bunch of us out there, and that’s how we distinguish ourselves — through our service — so find somebody with better service.
DG: There are a number of quench oil suppliers out there. I know some of them are not specifically targeting the heat treat market, but people still use them because they’re a local distributor or something like that.
I want to recommend to people that if you’re having trouble with the processing of parts, whether it be the mechanical properties and things of that sort, and you have a hint that it might be quench-related, it’s probably best to get ahold of people like Greg, who are actually focused in more on the heat treat market. They may have some good recommendations. This is just an encouragement to people that if you’re not using a heat treat specific quench company, there are a couple of them out there and, obviously, Greg at Idemitsu, we appreciate you giving us a little bit of expertise today.
Thanks very much, Greg. Appreciate it very much and appreciate you being with us.
GS: Thanks for your time, Doug. I appreciate the opportunity.
Heat TreatRadio host, Doug Glenn, talks with Mark Mills, one of the nation’s foremost experts on energy and technology about the future of energy and technology in the North American heat treat industry.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn (DG): I’m really tickled about this interview. For most of you, this gentleman is a heat treat industry ‘outsider,’ but listen, he probably knows more about energy and emerging technologies than pretty much anybody in the industry. I’m really looking forward to talking to Mark Mills, today.
Mark and I first met at the International Thermprocess Summit (ITPS) in Düsseldorf in 2017, back in the heyday of Marcellus and Utica Shale. So, Mark, first off, welcome, glad to have you here.
Mark Mills (MM): Thanks for having me. That was back when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth, I guess, right? It seems like a long time ago.
DG: That’s right. It does seem like a long time ago.
Let me give our listeners and viewers a quick idea of your background and then we’ll jump into some questions. I told Mark, before we hit the record button, it’s probably going to take me longer to introduce you than it is for the rest of the conversation.
MM: They can always google me in the magic machine, and they’ll know more than they want to know anyway, but go ahead, Doug.
DG: That’s exactly right.
Mark is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute which is a conservative think tank in New York City. He is also a Faculty Fellow at Northwest University’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and a strategic partner at Montrose Lane, an energy technology venture fund. Before this, he was chairman and CTO of the ICx Technologies which he helped take public in 2007.
He is either author or coauthor of four books: a 2005 book which I found to have a very interesting title: The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. That was coauthored with Peter Huber. In 2018, Work in the Age of Robots, which is interesting. Our publication recently did some work talking about how to work with robots. In 2020, Digital Cathedrals. The last question I want to ask you today is about your book that is just coming out or has just come out: The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the New Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s.
Mark has also published a lot of articles in The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Forbes, USA TODAY, and RealClearPolitics. He has been on TV on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS and now Heat Treat Radio (straight to the top!). Also, in 2005, he was on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which, by the way, I watched and liked. He’s also just recently joined the podcast ranks, so congratulations on that. This is a podcast I will recommend because I’ve listened to every episode so far, believe it or not, all three of them!
MM: Number four goes live in a few days!
DG: For those of you listening, the podcast is called The Last Optimist. My information says that it started on February 24th with “Unleashing Innovation,” so I highly recommend that.
The only other thing I want to mention about your background, Mark, was that you were in the White House’s science office as a staff consultant under President Ronald Reagan.
Again, welcome, and my first question to you is this: Did you ever meet Ronald Reagan?
MM: No, I was a kid, and I like to remind people that I was still in diapers at that time, so it doesn’t date me too much. When you talk to students and they hear “Reagan,” it would be as if, when I was a student, somebody came and talked to me and said they worked for Grover Cleveland, it would’ve been unimpressive. No, I never met him. I was twenty-something and the kids worked in little cubicles or cages, and you got fed your work, you worked seven days a week and you did what you had to do, and the President didn’t meet with the kids. Peggy Noonan, who famously was his speech writer, she was a contemporary — I didn’t know her then and I don’t know her now — but she wrote, some years later, that she never met the President either. I had a hand in writing one of his speeches because it was the only energy speech he ever gave. The speech writers were required to fly it by us techies in the science office to make sure they didn’t screw up, so I rewrote some of that speech — it was fun.
DG: I was going to say, that would’ve been right in the middle of the energy crisis. It seems to me there were a lot of energy crisis things going on and he was coming off of [President] Carter.
MM: Exactly. We had a combination of things: the 1979 Iranian revolution which, of course, then with the Carter’s presidency and also led to a 200% increase in oil prices, almost overnight, and so the world was in thrall of alternatives to energy and oil back then. Congress, in 1980, passed something I’ve been warning oil companies about ever since — the Windfall Profit Tax Act — to punish oil companies for making money for the foresight of having drilled oil before a price rise and storing it and selling it after a price rise, which used to be a business called “a smart commodity play” but Congress criminalized it. It took, I think, eight years before that law was repealed. It was a feckless law; it did not achieve its purposes, it just damaged American businesses. But anyway, I digress.
DG: Yes, but you know what? It just goes to show you no good deed will be unpunished.
MM: Yes, and Congress may do it again. They are talking about it again.
But my book comes out at a curious time. I wrote it during Covid lockdown times which is a dispiriting time to write an optimistic book, but I make analogies in my introduction to the book to the 1920s which also a dispiriting time. 1920 was the third wave of the 1918 flu, which in per capita terms was 400% more lethal than the Corona virus has been, and it primarily killed young people. The Corona virus has primarily killed old people. So, it was a devastating time. We had come off a horrific world war. We were in the middle of massive race riots in the early 1920s of a level that are, frankly, unprecedented and still haven’t been repeated, thank God. We had political turmoil over the fears of the Red Scare; this was right on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution and worries about communism infiltrating the western world, especially the United States. The world though, technologically, took off.
The 1920s were a time of great convergence of technologies of that era — not just one thing, it was multiple things. We had the dawn of a practical automobile, the dawn of practical airplanes, the advent of radio communications, the proliferation of telephony in homes, we had pharmaceuticals appear for the first time in history and chemical polymers that allowed cheaper products for consumers. It was a time of torrid growth that led to roughly 75 years of the greatest expansion of wealth and wellbeing the world has ever seen.
It also didn’t mean we didn’t have war. As I pointed out in the introduction to my book, governments can do stupid things, and one would expect another war, and I wrote this book right before the war broke out in Ukraine, not because I wanted a war, but because we fight wars, unfortunately. We can expect other recessions and depressions — that will happen too. All of that happened in the 20th century, yet the technological changes of the 20th century, everybody knows, brought astounding advancements in wellbeing and wealth, so the question you would have is, Could it happen again? Now, there are some economists (and it’s typically the economists) who say, “No. The new normal is slow growth. All the big things have been invented.” I call them “the new normalists.” The new normalists are wrong, and in my book, I set out to prove we’re on the cusp of a revolution not in one thing, but across all the same three fronts of transportation, machines and materials, and communications. Although, the lead title is the Cloud because at the center of it is something that is really unique — the cloud infrastructure is truly a unique thing in human history.
DG: Well, it sounds like a fascinating book. I may ask you a little bit more about it towards the end, but it sounds very good.
MM: You might even enjoy it if you read it! It’s available now at Amazon.com!
DG: I’ve got to get it. I honestly have not read it yet.
MM: I do have several chapters on energy in the book, of course.
DG: You mentioned materials, though, Mark. Do you have anything on materials in there?
MM: Yes, absolutely.
DG: Great. I can tell you a lot of people in our audience will be interested in that.
Let me ask you the first question. I want to harken back to something you said, which I think will be kind of provocative for our audience, and that was when you were on the deadly serious Jon Stewart Show. You said (or he said, I can’t remember which), “We don’t have an energy problem, we have a technology problem.” Why don’t you explain that, please?
"There is essentially an infinite supply of energy. Energy is all around us in all kinds of forms. It is always a question of what technologies are available to tap into nature’s energy forms (whatever the form is) in ways that are acceptable, and acceptable means affordable, reliable, clean enough — all the metrics that we care about in society — but it is always a technology problem. So, if you think there’s a shortage of energy, you’re essentially saying we’ve stopped technology innovation." - Mark Mills, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
MM: It was an interesting show, by the way. I hope he picks up doing book interviews again on his podcast. It was most interesting. I can tell you this, and it’s not to suck up to Jon Stewart (because you’re not Jon Stewart and he’s not doing TV anymore), but when you’re on the book circuit, you don’t expect people to have read your book, you really don’t; it’s not a reasonable expectation. But you’re happy to talk about your book because the whole point of writing it is you want people to know it exists. He was the only person that had obviously read the book before I came on the interview. You could tell by the questions. He’s a very bright guy, a very curious mind, and he was fascinated by this. He got the point, and the point, of course, was: energy is physics — and I’m a physicist so I confess to that sort of bias — and there is no limit to energy in the universe. There is essentially an infinite supply of energy. Energy is all around us in all kinds of forms. It is always a question of what technologies are available to tap into nature’s energy forms (whatever the form is) in ways that are acceptable, and acceptable means affordable, reliable, clean enough — all the metrics that we care about in society — but it is always a technology problem.
So, if you think there’s a shortage of energy, you’re essentially saying we’ve stopped technology innovation. You can have interregnums where the innovation slows down. It can be hard to find the new solutions and take time, so that would be the “shortage.” Shortages occur in the sense that we max out our access to land because energy is always about accessing land somewhere. You have to get your hands on land whether you’re getting land where the wind is or land where the oil is. It’s the same thing.
DG: Or land where the sun shines, or whatever.
MM: It doesn’t matter. You have to pay for, whether politically or in dollar terms, access to land, and then you have to build machines, and building machines always requires the extraction of materials from the earth and, given your audience, always everywhere requires the application of heat to convert materials from one form to another, and the application of heat and physics — and your audience knows this — thermionically means you always have waste. That’s why part of our other book title was The Virtue of Waste. By that, what we meant was that the virtue of waste is the fact of applying heat to bring order to the universe to get higher ordered materials. It means that that is a virtue; we want to get high ordered materials and low entropy higher quality steels, different kinds of polymers. These things require heat, so that the presence of waste heat is actually a direct indication that we’re doing a virtuous thing of creating order in our universe.
DG: Not to say that we try to maximize the amount of waste, but the fact that we’re creating waste shows that we’re doing something and it’s something productive.
MM: No engineer ever maximizes waste. What engineers are stuck with is what the fact of conversion efficiencies require you. It’s a misnomer. The idea that there’s waste energy is a total misnomer; it is the price you pay to take entropy out of systems. It’s the price you pay for conversions. It’s a cost. Now, you want to minimize the cost, so in engineering terms, it means minimize the amount of waste heat because you spend all kinds of money making heat, so I don’t want to throw it away needlessly. But every engineer knows this fact: if it costs me more to reduce the amount of waste heat than the money, I’d have to spend to get additional input fuel, I’m going to buy the input fuel, because it’s always about money. It really is, for every business.
DG: Speaking of business: So, our industry, which you know relatively well, having spoken at the ITPS, you had a good taste of it there — we are heavily natural gas, right? Especially North America. Now, over in Europe, where we met, it wasn’t so much that — there’s still natural gas but there is heavier emphasis on electricity, as well. Before the Ukrainian crisis, what was the long-term look for energy, especially natural gas, here in North America? Then, I want to ask you after that, just to follow up: How has that changed since the Ukrainian crisis?
MM: The long-term look was the same before as it is after in terms of the physics reality. That is, the world needs a lot more energy and would need a lot more natural gas. And the U.S. would eventually —depending on what administration and what policies were in place from Congress — expand its production and its exports. That, in my view, is locked into reality. The velocity with which that happened is what Ukraine changed. Now, we haven’t seen evidence of the velocity changing yet, but I do think that the Ukrainian crisis will serve as a reset back to reality of what governments need to do, both in Europe and here in the United States, to provide the kind of energy needed to make electricity and the kind of energy needed to make heat in process industries.
DG: So, you’re saying same-same, basically. Let me ask you the next question because this might really get to the gist of it. As you know, it’s all about price, right? Short-term, mid-term natural gas prices. . . again, here in North America, what are you thinking and what should heat treat natural gas users be watching to help them know what’s coming down the pike?
MM: I think any big industrial users of natural gas have learned something in the recent decade of the shale revolution: the incredible increase in gas exports. The U.S. is now the largest natural gas exporter in the world. Although Qatar is going to work hard to surpass us; they just announced tens of billions of dollars of investment of new LNG (liquid natural gas) export capacity. I suspect Australia is going to do the same. We don’t have a similar response yet, so short-term we know that natural gas prices have migrated towards being commoditized like oil prices, so they have been dragged into the exchange markets of the world. What that means in the short-term is exactly what you’re already seeing: gas prices get dragged up as traders worry and think about where future supplies are going to come from.
So, I think we’re going to see more volatility in the future, but I made that prediction in 2015 in Düsseldorf. The volatility comes from the combination of expansion of a U.S. production and the commoditization of the market globally, so that’s normal. Which would argue, if you’re a big consumer, to look to making favorable long-term contracts with suppliers — pretty normal, whatever the commodity.
But I do think in the short-term, the markets will be stressed because there’s going to be a lot of pressure. Europe, I think, is inevitably going to want to have more U.S. LNG. This will redirect LNG exports from Asia to Europe. That will, in the short-term, push prices up because you can’t build pipes fast enough, and believe me, Putin is going to build more pipes to China — that’s one you can almost take to the bank. But that takes time. So, during the build-out of those pipes and the competition for gas, we’ll see how this administration responds to expediting new export terminals. By the way, expedite export terminals move more gas in the markets, I think counterintuitively will help lower gas prices. The more relief we put into the market of supply certainty, the more forward prices, I think, will get pulled down. Short-term, I think volatility with trending up, not “crazy up,” I don’t think. If Europe tried to ban the use of Russian gas, gas prices will go crazy up, as they did in the short-term in the windfall in Europe.
Longer term, I’m very bullish on gas prices being moderate and cheap again because the U.S. can produce astonishing quantities of gas. I’ve talked to producers, and I won’t name names, that when gas prices for consumers, you were all really happy when it was $2.00, but if you’re a producer, you’re not a happy camper. But producers were still making a profit at $2.00. Who knew? I mean, it’s crazy! Nobody thought that was ever possible. Look, to be fair, if you’re a consumer, you want 2 not 3 dollars, but give a world that used to see 5- and 10-dollar gas, you know that you can live with 3 dollar or 4-dollar gas and do very well in the world markets because everybody else in the world is paying 5 to 15 dollars. And at those prices (let’s just throw numbers 3-5 for the clearing price in the United States), the United States can produce gas until it’s coming out of our ears, to use the obvious expression. And ship it to the world, net [price] landing in Europe for 6, 7, 8; I just think it’s the biggest single revolution that’s still underappreciated — not the oil from American production, but the gas. It’s huge, it’s monstrous!
DG: I’m curious about Russia. I don’t know how much of what goes on over there is going to affect us, okay, but I’ve got a couple of questions about Russia: After the Ukrainian crisis is over, do you see Russia returning to be a major player (which I assume they are now) in the energy market as far as actual ability to produce the energy, and do you think there is going to be any long-term push-back against buying energy from them because of instabilities or people not trusting or anything of that sort?
MM: Back in the dawn of time, I was what you’d call a “cold warrior.” I was in the weapons research and development business during the 1980s, and so I’ve thought a lot about competition with Russia and the Soviet Union for a long time. I’m no more expert than a lot of people and I would commend Niall Ferguson’s most recent writings on this; he’s very astute about the history of Russia.
But I think it’s pretty clear that a couple things will happen, and a couple things could happen. The two things that will happen is that Russia will continue to produce gas. They don’t have anything else to make money with. The other thing that will happen is that if the West doesn’t buy it, other people will — India, Russia, China, African nations, South American nations. So, there is lots of offtake, and the growth is in Asia anyway.
But if we sanctioned the gas, all that means is that those that are buying the sanctioned gas get a discount. They still get to buy it. I don’t think we can sanction China for buying Russian gas — I just don’t think that’s going to happen; I think it’s extremely unrealistic. So, they’ll keep producing gas; they have to.
I think we’ll see a realignment of interest. So, the interest in having the U.S. and Australia and Qatar, for example, (those three big producers), increase their supply to the world while Russia still needs the revenue is favorable to lower prices, let’s just say, if you’re just thinking economic terms. It’s favorable geopolitically because there’d be some delinking although now, we have new dependencies and links — we’re strengthening the geopolitical linkages between, let’s say, China and Russia, so that may have some unintended consequences.
"We will survive it anyway, even with our feckless policy house right now. We are a very big economy and very high inertia. Even as much damage as politicians are trying to wreak on our domestic energy industry, it’s pretty resilient, but it can be destroyed."
The wild cards, of course, are principally in Russia’s capacity to actually operate in its environment. You know, a lot of its gas production is in the north in the Siberian regions and it’s technologically extremely difficult. They’ve had a lot of help from the top performers in this field and those are the western oil and gas companies — the Exxons, the BPs, the Shells. Those companies have already pulled back. If they pull away, either because they’re ordered to, they’re sanctioned, or they’re just nervous, Russia runs the kind of risk that Mexico is facing now; their production is going down. It’s the kind of risk that Brazil faced before they let western firms come back in. Production declines because they don’t have the engineering capabilities. It's not that they’re not good engineers: the western oil and gas companies are just profoundly good at what they do, especially in difficult environments like deep water in the Arctic. So, that’s a risk. And if that supply starts to slip and it slips faster than the West makes up the difference, then we get upward price pressure, and I don’t think anybody can begin to guess the next five years of production in Russia, at this point.
DG: You know there are a lot of Americans that believe that if we would do certain things politically, on our end of the equation, that the U.S. could fairly easily make it through this little crisis moment. You commented in one of your podcasts about a fact, (and correct me if not quoting you correctly on this), but you said that it’s not a technology or an energy shortage issue, it’s a policy issue. So, we are something along the line of producing 1.5 million fewer barrels of oil today at $120/barrel than we were a year ago at $60/barrel. Do you think America could survive most of this if we get policy house in order?
MM: We will survive it anyway, even with our feckless policy house right now. We are a very big economy and very high inertia. Even as much damage as politicians are trying to wreak on our domestic energy industry, it’s pretty resilient, but it can be destroyed. As I wrote in my book, it is possible to Sovietize an economy; the Soviets demonstrate it. Venezuela Sovietized their economy. But I don’t think that will happen in America. I’m realistic that more damage could be done but we will survive it. We can’t insulate ourselves from global pricing, so if global oil and gas prices and a lot of pressure is put on and goes up, we will see prices rise here, which, if it goes up enough, we will suffer a recession, too.
Look, if oil prices tracked what happened the last two times we had a major interruption (we haven’t had major supply interruptions except ’73 and ’74, and the ’73 interruption took oil up 400% overnight), we’d be talking $300-350 oil. The Iranian crisis took it up 200%. So, these numbers would be destructive to the economy, we would suffer a recession because of that; it would trigger a recession because it would move too much money into the markets that need fuel and industries would be damaged — you know the trajectory. I think that is not likely but the crisis in Ukraine is volatile enough that you can no longer say it’s impossible. If Putin were self-destructive, he’d say, “I’m hurting. You want to see hurt? I’ll show you hurt.” Just turn the spigots off and gas and oil going to Europe. That would cause a whole lot of hurt there. And would you call that an act of war? Well. . . .
Let me spin a theory: Let’s just say he decided to do it in a Machiavellian way rather than saying, “I’m turning off the spigot.” Let’s just say that the pipe got blown up Nord Stream 1. He would blame it on Czechian terrorists or Ukrainian terrorists, or maybe his guys did it, but actually blow it up, we would see gas prices go wild because Europe would have to make up the shortfall somehow.
This is what worries me about where we sit of which we have not many options except to reset our policies to send a signal to the world that we don’t want to be caught in this position again and to not be caught in this position again because we’re tied to the hip with Europe whether we like it or not. I think that’s basically a good thing, I just think we are. Europe and we have to have an energy policy that economically and structurally signal to the market that we’re going to delink from dependency. Not no Russian oil and gas, but how about if we get, I’ll pick a number, a third of it from Russia instead of 70% if you’re Germany? Then you have some resilience. If that were the policy of the European Union and the United States in combination, the mere act of announcing that policy in legislation — so you can’t change it easily — would push down the forward price of oil and gas because markets price against future expectations. Right now, the expectation is either the possibility of less or the possibility of a lot less, not the possibility of a lot more — that’s not the expectation yet.
DG: Two more quick questions: Listening to some of you stuff, you’re not an anti-renewables type of guy, so again, thinking about our industry, I’m just curious, do you ever see a place where renewables of any type will play a significant role in industry, in general, but, more specifically, high intensity places where natural gas is used like the heat treat industry?
MM: No. That’s the short answer.
DG: Now the follow up: Why?
MM: The majority of processes can’t be done electrically. We can use microwaves, as you know, for a lot of processes, and plasma, so there is a lot of work in that area, and some very promising things. But there is really no easy path to replacing the efficiency, both thermodynamic efficiency and economic efficiency, of high temperature heat (flames) — that’s the nature of processing materials. So then, you’re only option is the current affection for “green hydrogen.” This is a profoundly misplaced aspiration. First, if we’re going to use hydrogen that we could begin to afford and produce at scale, it will be by reforming natural gas. So, it’s economically obvious — stripping the carbon out of CH4 just to burn the H is expensive and energetically counterproductive. So, that’s the “brown hydrogen.”
If we want to make hydrogen by electrolyzing water — your audience understands chemistry — the reason there’s still water on the planet is water does not want to be destroyed very easily. It’s a very stable molecule. You have to use lots of energy to get the hydrogen out and that, itself, makes it inherently — not just for the present but for the foreseeable future — far more expensive than natural gas. Until someone discovers a magic catalyst (and I’m not ruling that out!) that can disassociate hydrogen from water in some fashion that is, let’s say, ten times (not 10%) more efficient than electrolysis, that would be a big deal. But that doesn’t exist.
Renewables for heat. . . . Yes, sure, you make electricity with windmills. As long as you’re willing to take your electricity episodically, when the market provides it, and there are some businesses that turn on and turn off, but if you want to store electricity then we’re going to go back into chemistry world that your audience knows lots about.
If you spend ten minutes studying the physical chemistry of batteries, what you learn is that for storing energy, if I have to store energy so I can provide heat when I need it to run a process (especially continuous processes which are very common in heat treatment), storing natural gas as a compressed gas is relatively expensive; you’d rather have a pipe bringing it in. But if you just do it in straight economic terms: how many dollars does it cost to store a therms worth of energy in a compressed gas tank? How many dollars does it cost to store therms worth of energy in a battery? This is easy to figure out: it’s roughly a hundredfold increase in the cost per therm to store energy in a battery versus normal storing it.
Do the batteries get cheaper by a factor of two? Sure, maybe. So, it’s just fifty times more expensive. And will batteries get cheaper? I’m here to make a simple prediction I’ve been making for several years: NO. They’re getting more expensive now because they’re made from materials. Batteries are 60-70% cost denominated by the commodities used to make them and all those commodities are inflating because everybody wants the same commodities: lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel.
DG: Yes, and a lot of that is tied to the mining industry.
MM: A very slow industry to respond. And a challenging industry, to say the least.
DG: And not exactly a lot of stockpiles in the North American area. Most of those mines are Russia, China, . . .
MM: Africa, South America, yes.
Another fact-point: the United States was one of the largest mining regions, on a percentage basis, in the world forty years ago; we produced 90% of the world’s rare earth elements into the late 1990s. We produce nearly none now. But the absolute size of the mining sector in the United States is roughly the same in tons and minerals produced now as it was 30 years ago, but the world uses about three times more stuff. So, our share of mining has not kept up with the growth of our economy or the world’s economy, because it’s a hostile environment to open a mine in. We have lots of minerals. America is a very mineral-rich territory. But this administration just cancelled two mines, one in Minnesota to mine nickel and one in Alaska. So, we’re demanding more minerals and we’re going to be importing them; we are now. At least seventeen critical minerals are 100% imported.
DG: Maybe we ought to add to the old “drill, baby, drill” we ought to add “dig, baby, dig.”
MM: You took the words right out of my report that I wrote on this a year ago.
DG: Last question: Let’s come back to your book. I want to make sure our audience gets a good taste of what they would read in there. The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the New Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Why should they read it?
MM: You asked, “Do I cover materials?” The taxonomy of the book is that everything in society is based on technologies — that’s what civilization is built from. Humans are technology-creating animals; it’s what we do. We invent things, we build tools. But all the technologies fall into sort of three buckets or three spheres. They are one of only three things: It’s about information — acquiring it, moving it, storing it, processing it, technologies for that. The technologies of machines — machines to move, fabricate, control — we build machines. The third sphere is the sphere of materials. You can’t do anything with the machines unless you have materials to make the machines and the materials machines use to make other things. The universe of society is in those three domains.
What I do in my book is map out the changes that are underway — not speculative, not theoretical — but I look at what I call the revolution that’s already happened. What you want to know in order to know what the next 10 years will look like is not what was invented now or last year, but things that were invented 10 or 20 years ago that are just now reaching commercial viability. That would tell you that the tipping point towards these inflections of growth are close to us. That’s much more interesting than saying, “Oh, fusion is around the corner.” No, it’s not. We don’t know when fusion is going to happen. We haven’t invented a commercial machine yet. But if the first commercial fusion machine had been invented, say, 5 years ago, then you could say very different things about fusion in the next decade.
"What I do in my book is map out the changes that are underway — not speculative, not theoretical — but I look at what I call the revolution that’s already happened. What you want to know in order to know what the next 10 years will look like is not what was invented now or last year, but things that were invented 10 or 20 years ago that are just now reaching commercial viability."
So, I look at materials, machines and information through the lens of what has just happened, and then, what does that mean for employment, for entertainment, for education and for healthcare. I sort of map out the four big areas of what we want to do with machines and materials and information, and I map out, first, the revolutions in each of those three spheres where the epicenter of the revolution.
A thread through them all, for the first time, is this thing we call the cloud, which is not a communications tool — it’s a knowledge amplifier that’s democratizing expertise, democratizing skill. If I had said 10 years ago that you’d do a lot of your data information processing (not just storage) in the cloud, every one of the companies in your audience would stare at me doe-eyed and say, “No chance.” They’re all doing it now. You do it day to day when you do Google map or use Airbnb. But every single industry increasingly migrates their knowledge amplification, not just their storage. All of the software they use, not just in the back office, but to run processes. And some of the cloud hardware might be on premise for reasons of security or latency, but it’s still a cloud, the function is the cloud.
I think of the impact of the cloud in the three domains of communications — the cloud is impacting how we can communicate. The cloud is not a communications tool, it uses communications and amplifies it. We’re moving into an era where we have something that is called a materials genome where we can use supercomputers resident in the cloud to do what alchemists have talked about for centuries: Imagine a material, imagine properties you would like, and do experiments that would’ve taken centuries — you can do them hours in supercomputing. But here’s the key, coming back to your world: It not only all takes energy, once the materials are conjured (which took electrical energy to conjure), it then will still take heat to make those materials because nature does not want to give up entropy without you having to expend heat to plight it.
DG: Well, there is hope for us. There is hope for the heat treat world then, that’s for sure.
MM: There’s going to be a lot of heat treating going on for a long time.
DG: Mark, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your expertise. It’s good to talk to you and it’s nice to see you again. I’m sure we’ll stay in touch. Thanks for joining us.
Heat TreatRadio’seditor, Bethany Leone sits down withHeat TreatTodaypublisher and creator ofHeat TreatBoot CampDoug Glenn to discuss this one-of-a-kind heat treat training event. There’s nothing like it in the North American heat treat industry and you’ll want to send one or more of your people to this entertaining and informative event.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Bethany Leone (BL): Well, Doug, you get to be on this side of the microphone, which is great to have you at Heat TreatRadio and, of course, as our audience says, you’re always up to something crazy, unconventional, very interesting. So, why don’t you tell us about this Heat Treat Boot Camp that you’re concocting?
Doug Glenn (DG): Yes, thank you, Bethany. It is good to be interviewed by you, too!
Heat Treat Boot Camp is an idea that came about as the result of years and years of being exposed to the industry and knowing that a lot of the new people in the industry, (and also even some people with experience), would really like to know a lot more about the industry without having to spend 5, 6, 7 years just experiencing it, learning ‘on the job,’ if you will. So, the whole idea behind the Heat Treat Boot Camp is to cram 3 to 5 to 7 years’ worth of information into the heads of the attendees of the Heat Treat Boot Camp in a day and a half of classes. So, it is a very condensed tutorial on the North American heat treat market.
BL: I know I am eager to be a part of this and try to glean as much information as I can. Doug, when is it going to be? Have you determined those dates?
DG: Yes, we just signed the contract with the hotel. It will be on October 31st thru November 2nd. I do want to emphasize to people that on October 31st it starts in the evening of October 31st. That’s an optional reception- you can come, get comfortable in your hotel room, come down and have a few drinks and hors d'oeuvres with the rest of the heat treat community. The real education part starts on Tuesday, November 1st and we will go a full day. Then, that evening, we will go out and do some sort of special soon-to-be-announced event in the evening where we have a little fun out on the town in Pittsburgh somewhere. Then, we have a half day of classes on Wednesday, with lunch wrapping it up.
We are considering adding a plant tour on Wednesday afternoon. We haven’t determined that yet for sure, but that’s a possibility. Basically, all day Tuesday for classes, half day Wednesday for classes and then you either go home or you decide to go with us on a plant tour, if we end up providing that.
BL: You mentioned a hotel. Are you willing to share which hotel it is or is that going to be a surprise?
DG: No, I did forget to mention it. It’s going to be at the Hotel Double Tree by Hilton Hotel & Suites Pittsburgh Downtown. What’s kind of cool about this is it is right in the shadow of the US Steel Tower building. When you walk out the front door of this hotel, you look up and there is the US Steel Tower building. I think there is no place more appropriate for a heat treat boot camp than right in the shadow of the US Steel Tower. It’s going to be very exciting. It’s a great venue. There are genuinely nice people there and I think everyone should enjoy it.
BL: And you’re talking about speakers, too. Who are these speakers going to be? (I already know one because I’m looking at him.)
DG: Right, most everybody that comes is going to be subject to my speaking, yes. There are going to be about seven different presentations. I think I’ll be doing four and Thomas Wingens from WINGENS LLC International Industry Consultancy out of Sewickley, PA (a suburb of Pittsburgh) will give other more technical talks. I do want to emphasize these talks are not going to be heavily technical. This is really going to be about the players in the industry, (who are the companies in the industry that are making heat treat equipment and/or ancillary products), what are the products, the processes, the markets, and the materials. Those are the five main areas that we’re going to be covering.
BL: You got into this at the beginning, but can you share for our listeners again who exactly is going to benefit? It’s about the basics, but can you get into that a little bit more: maybe the positions that people hold that would want to keep their eye out for this?
DG: Good question. The answer is that it can be anybody that’s in the industry that feels like they need to know more. Ideally, it will probably be new employees who have just recently started in the heat treat industry. Typically, employees of some of our suppliers or employees of commercial heat treaters. It can also be new people in our core market (or our core listeners or readers). Captive heat treaters in the aerospace, automotive, medical and energy markets as well as any other general manufacturing would also benefit from this. But I anticipate a large number of the people who will be attending are those who are suppliers to the industry who want to send their new employees as well as people who may not be so new, but who would like to learn more about the heat treat industry and what it is they’re doing every day. Those are the people.
There is one other audience I will tell you about. We may get some of these people and that is an audience of investors and/or investment bankers, if you will, or lawyers — people who are interested in merges and acquisitions. This would also be an excellent place for them to come to get the lay of the land for the North American heat treat market and who does what. Of course, Thomas and I will be around to answer specific questions if people have specific questions.
BL: It sounds like there’s going to be a lot of people who want to learn something or who are constantly learning and usually trying to navigate, or are in the middle of navigating, that transition.
How is this training going to be different? Very clearly for our listeners, how is this different than any other training offered?
DG: I’ve been in the North American heat treat market for 30+ years now. There is nothing like what we’re going to offer. I know a lot of the different trainings that are out there and there is nothing like Heat Treat Boot Camp. It’s going to be very much basics, but it’s not going to be the basics of metallurgy and heavy in the process information; it’s really going to focus on the commercial side, if you will. You’ll get enough of the technical side. For example, we’re going to explain things like heat — where does it come from, how is it transferred? But we’re not going technical on that. It’s going to be very basic so that everybody can understand. There are two or three places where heat comes from and how it transfers. There are two or three ways that heat transfers from place to place. We’re going to cover some of that.
We’re going to talk about the equipment that is used in the marketplace — everywhere from the most basic box furnace up to some of the most sophisticated type of equipment that’s out there. And how is it used? We’re going to talk about induction heating. We’re going to talk about air and atmosphere furnaces. We’re going to talk about vacuum furnaces. And all the ancillary equipment that goes with it like burners, heating elements, atmosphere, insulation, and refractories. I mentioned atmospheres — either industrial gases and/or on-site generation with endothermic, exothermic, or even on-site hydrogen generation. And we’re going to talk about cooling systems. We’re going to talk about all those things and make sure people know, on a very basic level, what are those things and where they fit into heat treat.
There is no other seminar or webinar like Heat Treat Boot Camp. It is absolutely unique, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve been looking forward to doing this for years and years and I’m hoping it goes well.
BL: That’s great to hear, Doug, and thanks for sharing. So, it’s a lot of the basics. We’re looking at terms. We’re looking at people. We’re looking at the major players, and how everything in heat treat and the industry works together.
Anybody listening? If you are thinking you want to attend, start gathering your questions now because Doug and Thomas will be addressing them coming up this October/November.
How can people sign up or learn a little bit more about Heat Treat Boot Camp? Where can they find information?
DG: It’s very simple. The website is heattreattoday.com/bootcamp. Registration should open early April, so if this is beyond April, it should be there. I would love, love, love to see you there. I think it’s going to be a blast and a really great time, so I’m hoping to see a lot of people.
BL: Thanks for sitting down with us, Doug, and letting me host this episode of Heat Treat Radio.
Heat Treat Todaypublisher andHeat Treat Radiohost, Doug Glenn, is joined by Dan Herring, known in the industry as The Heat Treat Doctor® of The HERRING GROUP, Inc. In the second installment of a periodic feature calledHeat Treat Legends, listen as Dan tells stories from his 50 years of expertise and experience in the industry.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn: Dan, thank you for joining us. As you know, we’ve spoken before about this: You are actually second on our list of recordings that we’re doing in what we’re calling our Heat TreatLegends podcasts. There were several people that I had at the top of my list — you were one of them. First off, congratulations for being on that list and we’re looking forward to the interview today with you.
Dan Herring: Doug, it’s my pleasure to be here. I just want to say that I consider this a distinct privilege to be considered one of the heat treat legends. But I’d also like to point out to everyone who listens to this that no one individual can do it by themselves. So, I’m accepting this accolade, if you will, on behalf of the many men and women who toiled in, what I’m going to call, relative obscurity and who made this industry what it is today. On their behalf, I’m more than willing to be considered one of the Heat TreatLegends.
DG: Thank you, Dan, that’s very magnanimous of you — that’s very generous and a good way to start and keeps with the character that I know you have.
Let’s go back and talk a little bit about your history, very briefly, to give people a sense of when you started in the industry and your work history. We don’t want to go into too much detail, just where you’ve worked and things of that sort.
First time I met you, Dan, I can still recall it, was in the office of Mr. Ron Mowry at C. I. Hayes and I’m not sure whether it was Warwick or Cranston, Rhode Island, I’m not sure where they were located at the time, but I was a young buck in the industry and went up there with one of my colleagues to visit Ron, and you were there. That’s where I knew you started, where I met you at C.I. Hayes, but there may be time prior to that in the industry where you were already in the heat treat industry. Very briefly, go ahead and give us your history.
DH: First of all, Doug, you’ve got a great memory. I remember meeting you, as well. I’ve been in the industry now a little over 50 years. My working career prior to becoming a consultant in the industry dealt with, or I worked for, three companies and they were furnace manufacturers or, what we call in the industry, original equipment manufacturers. That was Lindberg, which was in the 1970s, C.I. Hayes which was in the 1980s and early 1990s, and then briefly for Ipsen. Then, I "got smart," as the phrase goes, and I saw an opportunity and I formed my own little company called The HERRING GROUP, Inc.
One of the things throughout my career, Doug, that’s rather interesting, is I’ve held an incredible number of different jobs with different responsibilities. I was hired as a corporate trainee by Lindberg. What that meant was that the corporation paid my salary and not the plant, so they were happy to have me, but I was a junior metallurgist who became a metallurgist who ultimately became the chief metallurgist of the organization. Along the way, I worked in engineering, I worked in international marketing, I was a junior application engineer, a senior application engineer, I was a product manager, finally winding up as chief engineer of the company. I joined C.I. Hayes and worked as their corporate metallurgist then became the technical director for the midwestern region of the United States, research and development director at Ipsen, director of new product development.
"My curiosity and interest in science has fueled, if you will, my working career. Metallurgy was once defined to me to be “the chemistry of metals,” which I’ll never forget – I enjoyed that definition." - Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor
So, I’ve done a variety of different tasks. You might say that I’ve been a chief cook and bottle washer of the industry, if you will. But all those tasks, seriously, have taught me what I know today. I learned something from every job I had. Most of my career has been spent “hands-on,” what I mean by that is actively running either heat treat departments, up to a dozen furnaces in the case of Lindberg (there were atmosphere furnaces, there were vacuum furnaces, there were induction heating equipment), running thousands of processes from anything from hardening to enameling. I ran hundreds and hundreds of demonstrations for customers to prove out that the process would work in a particular furnace. I’ve also had the good fortune throughout my career for a period of about 10+ years, I traveled about 15 days a month. To put that in perspective for people, there are only 20 to 22 working days a month. I was visiting customers, visiting manufacturing facilities up to 15 days a month and did that for over 10 years. So, I got to meet quite several people in the industry who, again, shared their experiences and their knowledge. I came across an infinite number of problems in the field that needed solutions, and on and on and on.
Where it began, interestingly enough, and I’m going to put a little call-out here to my parents, that always pushed me to become what I call the best version of myself. My mother was a registered nurse, but I would swear she was an English teacher in disguise; it’s where I learned my love of writing. My father was a machinist — a hands-on guy that ran screw machines. He was one of the most inventive people that I ever met. He was really a good, common-sense individual. And, to horrify the listeners, I’ve been in machine shops since I’ve been six years old. Today, you would never, ever bring a child to work with you and only tell them, “Don’t touch anything and watch yourself.” But anyway, I learned a great deal on the shop floor, so to speak. Then, combined with my education as an undergraduate in engineering and graduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I’ve learned a great deal of my craft from there.
That’s a brief overview of who I am. I’m an equipment guy, I’m a process guy, I’m a hands-on guy, and basically, I’m a problem-solver.
DG: Yes, right. There are two other things, Dan, I’d like to highlight that you’ve humbly left out of your description. One was, back in the day, when I was working for Industrial Heating as their publisher, you and I connected, and you started authoring a monthly column for them for over 10 years, I’m guessing, and had done that for quite some time. Not just because of that, but I would assume somewhat because of that, you heightened yourself as The Heat Treat Doctor®, which you did not mention but I think that’s how you’re really known in a lot of the industry is as The Heat Treat Doctor® from your website and, of course, from some of those columns. I think that’s notable.
And you also did not mention that you are an author of four books: Vacuum Heat Treating Volumes I and II and Atmosphere Heat Treating Volumes I and II, both fairly significant tomes in and of themselves.
DH: Well, thank you, Doug. We’ll talk a little bit more about The Heat Treat Doctor® brand perhaps a little later, but, yes, those are some of the accomplishments on my resume.
DG: Good, good, good.
You mentioned earlier, about some people — you mentioned specifically your parents, which I think was great. It’s very, very interesting, I always find, to see what influence parents have had on people. Is there anyone else you would like to mention that has been significant in the advancement of you and your advancement in the heat treat industry throughout the years?
DH: Well, a few people I think are noteworthy. But I’d like to begin on a rather interesting note. When I was a young boy growing up in Chicago, I want to credit my next-door neighbor, Mr. Joe Pallelo. He happened to be this strange person called a “heat treater.” I didn’t know what he did exactly, but he and my father would spend endless hours either talking between fences or in our yard or in his yard, so I grew up listening to two people talk about heat treating, among other things, which is very unique. Now, truth be told, and I probably shouldn’t admit this but I’m old enough to say it — I was probably more interested in his daughter than I was in him (true story!), but some metallurgy rubbed off along the way.
Also, I think it’s interesting that I have had the extremely good fortune of working for two or three people that actually fell in the genius category. These people were absolutely, positively of genius intellects and they worked within the heat treating industry. At Lindberg, there was a fellow by the name of Hobart Wentworth (aka Bart Wentworth) whose grandfather or great grandfather (I forget which) was actually mayor of Chicago, and he taught me the engineering discipline, if you will. In other words, translating what you learn in university into the real world.
The second one was a guy by the name of Russ Novy. Russ was the chief metallurgist at Lindberg when I started. He was actually a mechanical engineer, of all things, but was one of the smartest and finest metallurgists I ever knew. He had infinite patience, Doug, to tell you what he had learned, and explain things and talk about the root cause of things.
Then, at C.I. Hayes, I must give a shoutout to Herb Western. Herb, still to this day, by the way, holds the record, I believe it’s 300 patents in the state of Rhode Island. The first time I saw Herb he was sitting at this desk fiddling, believe it or not, with typewriter keys. He had a pile of typewriter keys on his desk — he would lift them up and drop them back into the pile, lift them up and drop them back into the pile. Now, I’m a brand-new employee. I’ve been introduced to him — that’s the only thing that stopped him from lifting and dropping typewriter keys. I watched him do this (because my office was right across kitty corner from his) for four days! I’m asking, “What are they paying this guy for?” Then, one day he got up and he walked away from his desk and a little later when I was out in the shop, I noticed that he was building a furnace. He built a furnace; he ran the typewriter keys in that furnace and C.I. Hayes was fortunate enough to get hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of business from this strange company called IBM to [indiscernible] typewrite keys.
"The things you learn in the industry, you must share because you strengthen the industry by doing that, you give the industry a competitive advantage by doing that and you’re helping, in your own small way, to educate the next generation of heat treaters. Because, at the end of your career, I think what you’re going to find is that what is important in our industry is to lead not to follow." -Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor
So, Herb had many, many inventions. He was an extremely creative fella. One more quick story — I don’t know if you want to take the time, but it’s worth it: Herb was the only guy I ever knew that while driving through a car wash got a brilliant idea for load transfer, through and in a furnace, from a car wash. He rode back through the carwash multiple times (of course, with the windows down), looking at the transfer mechanism and then went back to the shop and designed the principal drive system that C.I. Hayes uses to this day.
All in all, I think all the people that I worked with were outstanding. And since my working career ended in the furnace manufacturing, I’ve had a lot of people in the general industry, really contribute to my knowledge and my awareness of the industry. I probably could go on and on and on with people, but I’ll just give a special shoutout to one of them which is Bill Jones who is the CEO of Solar Atmospheres. He taught me quite a few lessons both in business and also from a personal standpoint. I’ve had a whole group of people, Doug, yourself included, that have influenced my life in great ways.
DG: That’s great. You know, Bill Jones, of course, was our first Heat TreatLegend guy, so it’s a good name to mention there.
That’s all very interesting, thank you. When you look back, now, on your career, what would you say, in your humble opinion, are the top two or three most significant accomplishments or achievements that you’ve had?
DH: You mentioned one which was the heat treat books. I’ve had the privilege of writing actually ten books and several of them — six, as a matter of fact — have been in the field of heat treatment. I feel that that’s certainly an accomplishment I’m very proud of. In other words, sharing what I know with others forever, if that makes sense.
The second, of course, is establishing, as you pointed out, The Heat Treat Doctor® brand. I’ll talk a little bit more on that later, perhaps.
The other thing that I guess I would say is that one of the things I’m most proud of accomplishing is doing a lot of good in the industry and doing as little harm to the industry as possible and also helping customers that have critical problems — whether they be in the aerospace industry, the medical industry, the automotive industry — helping them fix their problems and get back in operation again. I’ve been called up at three o’clock in the afternoon and asked, “How fast can you get here? We’ve shut the entire assembly plant down and there are a thousand people on layoff right now. Can you come in and help solve our problems?” That was on a Thursday afternoon, and by Saturday morning, they were back in production. Those are things I’m incredibly proud of. Those are the ones that stand out the most.
DG: Yes, that is impactful when it’s people you’re helping. That’s great.
Look back if you would please, Dan, on your career and say, “What are some of the lessons?” Give us two or three lessons that you’ve learned based on the experiences that you’ve been through.
DH: When I think of what I’ve learned or the lessons that I’ve learned, I think I’ll divide it into two areas: One I’ve learned in business and the second will be what I’ve learned in life. Relative to business, I think the first one is: Be honest. And, of course, be ethical, be fair, try hard, communicate well and have infinite patience. In other words, not everyone understands what you’re saying. You must take the time to explain what you mean to the people you’re dealing with. Although that’s a strange answer on the business side, I think it’s most impactful.
Then, on the life side, my advice would be to enjoy the moment, live in the moment. No matter where you are in the world, no matter what you’re doing, enjoy the moment. I’ll give you one little aside on that: I remember the first day I started to work at Lindberg — I took the train to work, it was right across the street from the train station, I was walking across the street, I was 21-years-old, and I said to myself, “Only 44 years to go.” And I turn around and the 44 years has disappeared like it was yesterday. So, you must enjoy what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
The other thing I would say is to never sacrifice family for work. Never, ever. I made myself a promise as a young man after missing a couple of my oldest son’s birthdays that I would never miss another birthday of his in my life, and I’m proud to say I haven’t. But I think that’s an important life lesson, as well.
DG: Yes, that’s good.
Were there any disciplines? You kind of mentioned a couple here, but were there any disciplines, whether they be life-general or work-specific, that you established during your work career you think have treated you well? Things that you’ve said, “This is a discipline I’m going to do every day, every week” or whatever it is. Is there anything along that line that you can remember?
DH: Well, I have two passions in life right now. From the time I was old enough to remember, I had a passion for science, chemistry, in particular. My curiosity and interest in science has fueled, if you will, my working career. Metallurgy was once defined to me to be “the chemistry of metals,” which I’ll never forget – I enjoyed that definition. My other great passion in life is mathematics. I think that the logical thinking and the problem-solving aspects of that discipline stand out to me as something that help every day.
DG: You mentioned earlier, just briefly, about not missing your son’s birthdays and things of that sort, which makes me wonder about this question which I’ve asked before in other interviews and that is: How about work-life balance? Any tips for people? I, personally, find it difficult to turn off the work at five or six o’clock, sometimes. Any guidance or any suggestions for work-life balance?
DH: First of all, Doug, that’s a hell of a question to ask a workaholic! Howsoever, absolutely, positively, there is a life-work balance. It’s different for each individual person. I will simply share mine and that is the fact that I have the unique ability, once the workday ends (and the workday may be 12+ hours), but once the workday ends, I can immediately transition into relaxation and “fun mode,” as I call it, without one thought about work. The thinking about work maybe creeps in when, finally, about midnight you’ve gone to bed or about 4:00 a.m. when you wake up, but the idea is the fact that I have real quality time to enjoy family and friends and pursue some of my nonwork passions. I don’t know if I should mention these; I mentioned mathematics, but I enjoy poetry and critical thinking, and those are hobbies of mine.
DG: Do you find those hobbies to be exceptionally helpful to you in the sense of giving you a mental break from what you do? Does it make you a better metallurgist, a better engineer?
DH: Yes. I really believe — and this is where that work-life balance comes in — you have to get away from it, whether it be five minutes or five days, you have to get away from it so you can come back to it refreshed and ready to go.
DG: Yes. There is a concept out there about what they call “focused thinking” and there is “diffused thinking.” A lot of times when you’re focused on something and you’re thinking and you just can’t get it, you get away for a while. You’re in the shower or you’re sleeping at night and suddenly, boom — there it is! It comes to you because you weren’t focused on it, you were diffused. You were out doing something else and all of a sudden, the genius moment comes.
DH: I will warn people: Don’t shave when the genius moment comes! It can be a life altering experience. It did happen to me, but that’s another story for another day.
DG: Well, that maybe ties into this next question and that is this: This is maybe a little bit more of a serious question because, you know, life is not, as they say, all a bed of roses. What was the most trying time for you in your work career (whatever you’re comfortable saying) and coming out the other side and looking back, are there any lessons you would have learned from that?
DH: I think one of the things that I think people will find to be a little bit unique, is that in my professional career, I’ve had very few trying times. Yes, I’ve had insanely tight deadlines, horrible/horrific travel schedules, getting to a hotel at three o’clock in the morning when you’ve got to get up at six and go visit a customer (we’ve all been there), and trying to temper customer expectations from “the want” to “the need,” if you will. Those are trying professional times.
But some of the work lessons that I’ve learned from that is that not everyone brings the same intensity or focus to a project as you do. Everyone is not as dedicated, and I want to not say “driven” because a lot of people are, but I hold myself to a high standard and as a result of that, you must learn to temper it down, to use a heat treat term. You have to learn to make sure that the recipient of the knowledge is receptive to the knowledge. I’m very much “old school,” although you’d never guess that from looking at me, but my word has always been my bond. I was taught long ago — if you say it, do it. If you don’t want to do it, don’t say it!
So, yes, I can handle pressure, I can handle a tremendous amount of stress, and I don’t view work as work, I view it as just a true labor of love. But all of that, my personality and all my experiences and all the help I’ve been given through the years, have blunted what you’d call “trying times.” I’m very fortunate in that sense.
DG: That is a blessing, honestly. I don’t know that there are a lot of people that could say that. Most people, I would think, if I asked what the most trying time is, something immediately pops into their head. So, that’s very fortunate, it really is.
Let’s flip that question on its head though: If you can think of one most exhilarating time, what would it be? What was the peak of your career?
DH: Again, I’m probably going to give you a very nonconventional answer. And I will also make the comment that this is, perhaps, a little bit of a sexist comment, as well, but I have to say it: I’m lying in bed one evening with my wife many years ago and I do a “sit up” — “I’ve had that “genius moment” and I said, “Oh my God, I’ve got it: The heat treat doctor!” Now, my wife, who’s semi asleep at this moment in time when I have my eureka moment, glances over at me and says, “Now that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” She rolls back over and goes to sleep. Well, it took me quite a while to get back to sleep. But, anyway, now we’re laying in bed about ten years later and she says to me, “You know, I was wrong. That heat treat doctor idea is really something.” And I’m lying there, Doug, and I’m going — I can count on one hand the number of times in life a man has ever heard a woman say, “I was wrong.” So, although I wanted to do a fist pump, I restrained myself, I lay there in bed basking in the glow of masculine superiority for all of about 30 seconds and then it’s business back as usual.
This is not a personal accolade here but establishing The Heat Treat Doctor® brand has brought heat treating into the forefront of manufacturing, into the forefront of the industry, into the forefront of engineering, that, yes, there is something called heat treating and it is a solution to your needs. So, I view the brand as not so much a personal accomplishment as an industry accomplishment.
DG: Yes. Well, again, I think you’re being modest, because if I can just interject here: You know The Heat Treat Doctor® idea was good, as has proven out to be the case, but there could be other people who would’ve come up with that and it would not have been as successful. Personally, Dan, I think that the reason that is the case with you, specifically, is because of your relatively unique skillset, which you’ve mentioned and I’m just going to highlight here a little bit.
I think you said it was your mother who taught you “all things words” and English and grammar and things of that sort. It’s a unique skillset to have someone who is knowledgeable about engineering, knows what they’re talking about and can do two additional things besides just knowing the engineering: One, they’re patient enough (as you’ve mentioned in an example of someone you’ve talked about) to be able to spend time to explain it, but secondly, they’re good at explaining it. Some people are just not good teachers. You capture all three of those elements, if you will, “the engineering knowhow”: the ability and patience to teach and the ability to explain things well. I think that’s why The Heat Treat Doctor® has worked for you and worked very well.
DH: I think that’s the case, Doug, and I agree.
DG: Last question for you, because I always like to go away and depart on a question of: You know, you’re an old-timer, right? (Not by my assessment but by your own statement. I still think you have a lot of years left here and we look forward to those.) But what kind of advice would you give to the younger people? You know, Heat TreatToday does 40 Under 40 — we’ve done three or four years of that, so we’ve got either 120 or 160 young people under the age of 40. Hearing advice from those more senior in the industry can be helpful. Are there any pieces of advice you would give to those young people?
"The idea being the fact that soap is your friend, soap is not your enemy. Get out there, do good and do work with your hands, contribute to your science and you will be a success."
DH: Yes. It’s a very, very good question. The thing that comes to mind first, and this is perhaps difficult for younger people to understand, but you have to share your knowledge openly and without reservation. Now, I’m not saying give away company secrets. The things you learn in the industry, you must share because you strengthen the industry by doing that, you give the industry a competitive advantage by doing that and you’re helping, in your own small way, to educate the next generation of heat treaters. Because, at the end of your career, I think what you’re going to find is that what is important in our industry is to lead not to follow. In other words, heat treating has to be the most cost-competitive industry or we will cease to exist.
An example I use, and everyone under 40 won’t understand this but I beg you to try: When I was a young man, there was something in this world called the slide rule. We could do marvelous engineering calculations with nothing more than a slide rule. Well, the slide rule is a thing of the past. It’s a device that works perfectly fine, but who would ever use it over a calculator or a computer? It’s a product that’s obsoleted itself. We cannot let our industry obsolete itself.
Another piece of advice is: Don’t worry what people say, what they do or what they think. Do good, contribute to your science and grow the industry. I guarantee you that at the end of your careers, you will feel like you’ve never really worked a day in your life.
The last piece of advice would be to emphasize: Be a hands-on engineer. Be a hands-on person. This is from my father, of course: Look at the practical side of things, the practical skills, the common sense that it takes to do our jobs. And don’t be afraid to go out there and get your hands dirty — soap was invented specifically for that purpose.
If I can indulge and give one last story (I’m all about telling stories with morals). I always have a bar of Lava soap in the bathroom so when I come in from working outside, I can wash my hands. I was out with the grandson one day a few years ago and we went into the house, and we went in the bathroom to wash our hands, and he took one look at that Lava soap, and he said, “Boy, does that taste bad.” And I’m thinking how would he know what Lava soap tastes like if his father hadn’t washed his mouth out with it? The idea being the fact that soap is your friend, soap is not your enemy. Get out there, do good and do work with your hands, contribute to your science and you will be a success.
DG: Thanks, Dan, so much. I appreciate the time you’ve invested, not just with us here today, but for the 50 some years you’ve put into the industry. It’s been a great pleasure knowing you and working with you. We look forward to doing more with you here at Heat TreatToday, but thanks for all the very, very positive contributions you’ve made to the industry. We appreciate your time.
DH: Doug, it’s my pleasure and thank you for doing this. I think it’s going to be a tremendous service to the industry.
Heat TreatRadiohost, Doug Glenn, and several other Heat TreatToday team members sit down with long-time industry expert Dan Herring, the Heat Treat Doctor®, to discuss the difference between heat treating and thermal processing. If you’ve ever wondered about the difference – if one actually exists(!), then you’ll enjoy this highly informative Lunch & Learn with Heat TreatToday.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn (DG): So, Dan, I want to turn it over to you, but I want to give a context though of what we’re going to be talking about. As you just mentioned, before we hit the record button, we’re pretty heat treat centric in our world, but there are a lot of other thermal processes that go on that aren’t exactly heat treat. We talk about some of them in our publication, not all, so what we’d like to do is turn over to you to talk about the difference between “heat treating proper” and “thermal processing, generally speaking.”
Dan, welcome and thanks for educating us.
Dan Herring (DH): Well, thanks, Doug, and good afternoon, everybody. First of all, for everyone listening, I hope to cover the basics providing information without confusing everyone. If there are any questions as I go along, please don’t hesitate to ask them. I think it’s always better to have an interactive, back and forth discussion on things.
You are absolutely correct, Doug. we live in a heat treat centric world. I’m going to start off in familiar territory by discussing a little bit about heat treating. Then, we’re going to move into the differences between heat treating and thermal processing.
To give a simple definition of heat treating — simple yet complicated at the same time — is heat treating is the controlled application of time, temperature and atmosphere to produce a predictable change in the internal structure (that means the microstructure to metallurgists) of the material being treated. Now, the interesting part is that heat treating is (a) predictable, which is why metallurgists exists in the world and it is (b) controlled, which is why heat treaters exist in the world, and the darndable thing about heat treating is that it happens inside the metal or the material and, unfortunately, you (c) can’t see the changes that are taking place.
"Let me give you an example, if I can: I’ll hold this up; I don’t know if people can see it that well, but what this is is a helicopter transmission gear."
Let me give you an example, if I can: I’ll hold this up; I don’t know if people can see it that well, but what this is is a helicopter transmission gear. And if we were manufacturing this particular gear, one of the things we would do to measure, if we were successful or to see if we were successful, is to measure the dimensions of the gear that we were actually taking and manufacturing. But in the world of heat treating, because the changes happen inside the material, it’s very difficult to know if the part is good or not. But heat treating has the ability, as we say, to vary the mechanical properties, the physical properties and the metallurgical properties of a material. The problem is that we can change them either for the better or, as most heat treaters know, we can change them for the worst. That’s why there is something called quality control and quality assurance. But I’m drifting away from the main point.
In the world of heat treating, with that definition — the controlled application of time, temperature and atmosphere to produce the predictable change in the internal structure of a material — not only are we heat treat centric in this industry, but we are also often steel or iron and steel centric in this industry. Metallurgists tend to be either ferrous metallurgists (specializing in irons and steels) or nonferrous metallurgists, specializing in things called aluminum, or as the British and Europeans would say, “aluminium,” titanium, and some of the super alloys and things of this nature. The idea being the fact that there are a lot of different materials that can be heat treated.
We often limit ourselves, if you will. But there are parts of our industry that heat treat: for example, precious metals — the golds, the silvers, the platinums and things of this nature. There are also parts of our industry that deal with copper and brass. There are parts of our industry that deal with ceramics which deal with powder metal, if you will. So, one of the things as heat treaters we must remember is that even under just the heat treat umbrella, there are a lot of different disciplines out there. There are a lot of things that we cover, and we look at. There are a lot of different materials that are processed. And again, we think, in general, as heat treaters and probably incorrectly so, we think about what are called “semifinished goods.” What we think about are parts that are manufactured from steel, aluminum, titanium, copper or powder metal. We think of automotive parts, aerospace parts. We think of something like weapons or military equipment, ammunition, firearms. We think of agricultural products, farm implement products and things of this nature. So, one of the things we must be aware of is that there is a whole world outside of our comfort zone, and that is something that we’re going to explore today.
Before I go on, does that make sense to everyone, or does anyone have any questions about the heat treatment side of what we do?
"Heat treating is the controlled application of time, temperature and atmosphere to produce a predictable change in the internal structure (that means the microstructure to metallurgists) of the material being treated." - Dan Herring
DG: No, I think that makes sense. You mentioned on the inside of the part that things can’t be seen so much. You will probably get to this Dan, but I assume that also includes surface treatments, or would that be something different?
DH: We’ll talk a little bit about the difference between surface treatments and they fall into an area probably referred, in general, as “coatings” and things of this nature. But that is a good question, Doug- plating and coating and things of this nature.
Also, one of the things about heat treating that seems a little bit, possibly confusing is that heat treaters consider processes like brazing (which is a joining process), and they think of soldering (which is a low temperature joining process), as heat treatments. Similarly, we think of sintering, and we think of heat treatments of powder metal products, or we think of powder metallurgy as falling under the subject of heat treatment because we think so much about sintering. But sintering is a bonding or a diffusion process. So, heat treaters think of heat treatment, they think of brazing, and they think of powder metallurgy all combined into that big umbrella. For any brazers who are listening, or any powder metal people who are listening — they probably died of cardiac arrest at this moment in time — but, in general, that’s what heat treating does: it considers those separate entities as part of it.
Let’s go on and look at the fact that I can say to you — automotive components, gears, bearings, aerospace components, landing gear transmission boxes, fasteners, screws, nuts, bolts, farm implement equipment -- those are things that commonly come to mind. People don’t often think, for example though, of things like jewelry which is something that is commonly heat treated or “processed,” if you will, more on the thermal processing side. A lot of electronic materials are also thermally processed, and a lot of castings and things done in the foundry industry.
But, as I said, we think of semifinished goods where a semifinished goods-centric/heat treat-centric world; but there are other worlds out there. Let’s kind of talk about them. But mill practices, or what we call “primary metals,” are another area that’s covered, interestingly enough, under heat treating. Because in steel mills and things of this nature, you’ll find soaking pits, for example. In aluminum processing facilities or aluminum foundries, you might find solution heat treating and aging ovens and things of this nature. So, there is, in a very broad or general sense, heat treating also done on the mill or the material production side of things. Again, unless we’re in that industry, we don’t tend to think about it that much. So, we have to.
But, if I also said to you that things like cosmetics are being processed, not heat treated, but thermally treated, if you will. Or things like cement, or minerals in raw ore, ore materials and things- these all fall in the category of now “thermal processing.”
Let me try to give everybody just a feel for what the different categories of thermal processing are. The number one category, of course, is heat treatment. There is another thermal process . . . . And, by the way, thermal processes are also confused a little bit because we use heat, or we use cold — those are both thermal processes. For all the heat treaters out there, we do things like deep freezing, and we do things like cryo-treatments, cryogenic treatments. Those fall under the umbrella of heat treating. But there are other deep cooling or cooling processes that fall under this umbrella of thermal processing.
Besides heat treatment, thermal processing consists of a few areas which you are maybe familiar with and then again maybe you’re not that familiar with. One of them is calcining which I often call the drying of powders, if you will. This can be in the form of ores, it can be in the form of minerals, it can be in the form of coke (which is a coal byproduct, if you will), it can be in the form of cement. So, there are drying processes that occur under thermal treatment which is in the area of calcining.
There is also a big category called fluid heating where what we’re doing, (and by the way, air is a fluid as well as water and liquids are fluids), so we can turn around and do things like chemical processing which is done at elevated temperature. I had a client that was producing mayonnaise and the mayonnaise has held at 180 degrees Fahrenheit- it is a thermal process, if you will.
Distillation. We won’t talk about alcohol much in the world. I will only comment that all of you think this is a bottle of water, but you could be mistaken about that.
The idea is that fact that fluid heating, calcining, drying, smelting, metal heating in general, curing and forming — which is done a lot on ceramics, on paints, paint drying and things of this nature. There is, just in general, other methods of heating. I’ll give you a simple example: waste incineration. We know that our trash is burned at ultra-high temperatures to reduce emissions, if you will, but avoid going into landfills or, worse yet, dumping it in the ocean and believing that somehow it won’t return to our ecosystem. But incineration is an example of a thermal process.
There are quite a number; there are literally hundreds of thermal processes that are occurring all the time that we don’t, in general, think very much about. Heat treating is typically divided into two general categories — processes that soften a material and processes that harden a material. So, in the category of softening, we think of things like aging, we think of things like annealing, we think of things like normalizing, or even stress relieving (in other words, taking the stress out of material is a softening process).
DG: Tempering, as well, Dan? Would it be in that?
DH: Well, tempering, in a sense, could be considered a softening process. It’s a good one. I consider it more a softening process than a hardening process, but it’s typically so intimately linked with hardening that people think of it as a hardening process. But, hardening and case hardening, austempering, and then, of course, brazing which is a joining process, soldering, sintering which is a bonding process, homogenizing (when we talk about aluminum), solution treating (when we talk about aluminum). Solution treating is not a hardening process, interestingly enough- it’s the aging or the precipitation hardening process after the solution heat treatment that is actually the hardening process.
The idea of the fact is that we’re very familiar with those terms; we’re less familiar with coke ovens or waste incinerators or distilling facilities, or things of this nature. We’re not used to processing resins or composite materials, even though there are autoclaves that use a combination of high pressure and temperature to form some of the composite materials that are used in the aerospace industry.
The way I like to think about it is there is a giant umbrella which is called thermal processing. Under that umbrella is a small segment, maybe not so small, called heat treating, and then heat treating is divided into semifinished goods and raw materials (or primary goods), and then it’s subdivided into irons and steels and nonferrous alloys. Now, in my day, when you graduated university, you graduated with a degree in metallurgy. Today, you become a material scientist which means that you’re dealing with composites, ceramics, electronic materials, a whole series of materials outside the realm of just iron and steel and aluminum and titanium, if you will.
The other thing that’s very interesting about our industry, in general, is probably the aspect of energy usage. The thermal processing industry, in general, and this is a rather stunning number, uses, in round numbers, about 38% of the energy produced in the United States. Now think about that as a number. Of all the energy consumed by people in the U.S. or in Canada or in Mexico or anywhere else in the world, two-thirds of it or greater — 40% of it, almost — is used in thermal processing. About 25% is used by transportation, and another 20% or so is used by residential. Then, there’s about 15% used in, what we call, “other” category. But, in thermal processing, which is also true in heat treating, about 80% of the energy comes from natural gas. And only 15%, (round numbers), comes from electricity.
We have to realize that we’re not only, as heat treaters “heat treat-centric,” “iron and steel-centric,” “aluminum-centric,” but we’re also “natural gas-centric.” Those are staggering numbers to consider. The reason for it, the reason we’re natural gas centric, not only in the heat-treating industry but in the thermal processing industry as a whole, is simply because natural gas is the cheapest energy source available right now. And, these numbers, although they apply specifically to North America, can also apply, if you will, to the world in general. The numbers vary a little bit throughout the world, they may be different in Europe and different in Asia, but not so much that it varies so greatly.
What I’ve tried to cover — and I realize I haven’t left a lot of room for questions here and I apologize for that — but I’ve tried to give you the idea that heat treating is a very important part of a much larger industry that services the manufacturing community.
Let’s open for discussion from anybody.
Dan Herring and the Heat TreatToday team: Karen Gantzer, Bethany Leone, Doug Glenn, Dan Herring, Evelyn Thompson, and Alyssa Bootsma
DG: That sounds good. Do any of you have questions, at all?
Alyssa Bootsma: I did have one. I think it was very helpful in understanding everything and the idea that thermal processing is an umbrella and heat treatment is just a part of that really clicked for me. I was wondering if you could talk about calcining a little bit more and what that process actually is.
DH: Sure. But before I do that, I want to mention one thermal process that I forgot to mention. Because I have a number of clients that work in the baking of cookies, and because I’ve consumed a few of those in my life, I don’t want to forget the baking industry.
DG: The brewing industry?
DH: Absolutely! By the way, the brewing hall of fame is located here in Chicago, unless I’m grossly mistaken.
Before we get to far afield, let’s talk about calcining a little bit. A number of powders, whether they be ores or whether they be things like cement or various minerals, are often processed in, what we call, a slurry. They’re processed in a form in which they are either cleaned or washed with water or with different chemicals. As a result, you have a wet mixture of a mineral and, let’s say, water, or in some cases they can be different chemicals, if you will, that go to either clean the minerals or dilute the minerals or things of this nature. But to go to further processing of those minerals, you have to dry them and put them into a form that they can be used. If this makes any sense, then let’s take cement as an example. It’s no good to keep the cement in a slurry because what’s going to happen to the cement? It’s going to dry and harden. So, what you have to do to send it to the consumers is you have to dry the powder, if you will, deliver it to the end-user who will then add liquid to it to once again form it or turn it into liquid cement. Calcining, is really, in simplest terms, to answer the question directly, I always consider it, a powder-drying process.
DG: Dan, any idea why they call it “calcining?” I’ve always wondered this.
DH: Well, in the old days, I believe that limestone, (which is calcium carbonate), and so "calcining" and "calcium" from the calcium carbonate, I think that’s where the name originally came from. A good thing to look up, however- that’ll be my homework assignment.
DG: There you go. Just as another example of a thermal process, it’s certainly not heat treat, just down the road from where I live, north of Pittsburgh, they have a lot of sand and gravel places. Believe it or not, there is a large, what I would call a, horizontally-oriented “screw furnace” — it’s a cylinder and it just rotates, and inside it’s heated up and they’re just simply burning off the moisture so that they can get the materials, or whatever it is they’re harvesting out of the earth, and get it down to a certain level of moisture so that they can process it. So, sand and gravel. That’s just another area.
Here's another one — and Dan, I want you to hit on glass if you don’t mind, in a minute — but here’s another one where thermal processing is used, which you might not think of, and that’s in the manufacturing of paper production. They’ve got to actually dry the paper and you wouldn’t think of it but they’re passing paper through flame (between flames, not actually in the middle of the flames) simply to dry paper before it goes onto these huge rolls.
One last comment, Dan: We often talk about energy intensity and how much energy it actually takes to perform a certain process. One of the highest thermally intense processes that is used is not so much a heat treatment, but it is actually the manufacturing of concrete, believe it or not. There is very, very high energy intensity — it takes a lot of gas, in this case, to produce concrete.
But Dan, if you don’t mind, could you hit on glass production? We’re all looking out windows here and the manufacturer of glass is a thermal process.
DH: Absolutely it is. But before I do that, quickly, that rotary drum that you saw, the one with the screw inside it, if you will, that helps move the powder, if you will, or the sand and gravel through, is a very typical calcining furnace. Rotary drums are also used in the heat treatment industry to process screws and fasteners, nuts and bolts, small products, if you will, typically.
But yes, paper is a good example but glass furnaces, too, where the glass is actually brought up and the sand and other elements, if you will, are melted into glass. Very disconcerting. You may find this interesting but roughly the walls on a glass furnace (I’ve seen 10-20,000-pound glass furnaces) are something like 4 inches thick, holding back all that molten glass. But again, you’re taking glass that is basically silicone dioxide, its sand is a major component of it. In colored glasses, you add different chemicals. Like, for example, if you want to form a bluish colored glass, you might add a copper oxide, for example, which will change or tint the glass to a different color.
You’ve heard of leaded glasses, for example. In the old days you added lead to glass to make it, again, more formable, if you will. But yes, glass furnaces or the manufacture and production of glass is very energy intensive, as well as cement, as is the production of aluminum, by the way, which basically uses electricity, which is why all of the aluminum facilities are located either near hydroelectric or thermal energy like in Iceland, for example, where you have geothermal energy which is used to heat and produce electricity. But yes, glass is definitely an example of a thermal process, as well.
Glass is interesting because we don’t necessarily do a lot of heat treatment of glass, but you may have heard of glass-to-metal sealing, where we’re actually taking a glass and sealing it into or onto a metal component. Like, for example, the site ports of burners where we look in to see the flame — those site ports are made by glass-to-metal sealing. But, in general, yes, melting and production of glass is a thermal process.
DG: Dan, correct me if I’m wrong, and I could be wrong on this, but cellphones, right? Your glass on the front of that — the reason it is actually quite strong and won’t break is because it’s been thermally processed, a tempering process of some sort, I believe. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it the thermal process that can make a glass really, really difficult to break?
DH: It is, plus the fact that glass is a quasi-solid, as we say. It’s a solid but it’s really not; it has more characteristics of a liquid, which, again, makes it more ductile or resistant to things It makes it more shock absorbing, for example. But yes, cellphones and cellphone glass are something I’ve got to do some more research on.
DG: Right. They’ve got some stuff called “gorilla glass.”
I just want to recap a couple things for our team here and for other people that might be listening: When we talk about heat treat, which is what we’re centered on, it’s helpful for us to know what processes, materials and things that includes, and what processes and materials that doesn’t include, and that’s why this conversation on thermal processing versus heat treat is helpful for us. The way I like to describe it to our team and to most of the people who would be reading our publication or listening to this podcast, is typically Heat TreatToday is not involved with the making of steel but almost everything else after the making of steel we would deal with, almost everything. So, we don’t really do the steel making. Steel making, however, is very much a thermal process but we just don’t cover it. There are other publications that cover that. And we are very much steel-centered; we do aluminum, as well. However, in the aluminum world, we actually do deal with aluminum making. For reasons that basically have to do with the temperature range: the temperature range isn’t quite as high with aluminum making as it is with steel making. So, we do some of that. We don’t do a lot with aluminum making but a lot after aluminum is made. We do a lot of the homogenizing, annealing, solution heat treating and that type of stuff.
So, that is us. In heat treating, we define things like brazing, even though it’s a joining process, we tend to cover it. Soldering we don’t tend to cover because it tends to be a lower temperature. Dan didn’t mention it, but I’m sure he would, is welding: it’s a joining process but it’s not exactly anything we cover either. It’s not what we consider to be heat treating.
There is another joining process that we didn’t cover, and maybe we could hit on it briefly next time, and that is diffusion bonding which, to be quite honest with you, I haven’t done a lot of study on it so it would be interesting to know what that is. I know it’s done in vacuum and under high pressures, I believe, but things of that sort.
At any rate, that what’s we mean when we talk about heat treat — it’s primarily steels, aluminums, titaniums and typically not steelmaking and probably not titanium making either, but aluminum making and everything downstream from that tends to be us, and our temperature ranges tend to be, very generally speaking, 800 degrees Fahrenheit and above, or as Dan mentioned, we can also do some things in the cryogenic range which are subzero temperatures. So, that is us. Everything that falls outside of that we would consider to be a thermal process, which is a lovely thing, but just not our cup of tea.
DH: Look at this, Doug, a whole new business opportunity for you. With that, I’m extending myself beyond metallurgy, so I’ll quit there.
DG: Dan, we really appreciate it. We look forward to more of these. We are going to try to do other topics, again, what I would call heat treat 101 type topics, our Lunch & Learn series with Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor®. Dan, thanks a lot, we appreciate your time.
Heat TreatRadiohost, Doug Glenn, discusses the current state of robotics in the North American (and European) heat treat markets with ECM-USA, Inc. managing director, Dennis Beauchesne. Find out where robotics is currently being used as well as some future applications.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn (DG): Dennis, thanks for joining us. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked about finally getting together on Heat TreatRadio to have a conversation about some interesting things. Today, we’re going to talk to Dennis Beauchesne of ECM USA about robotics. Dennis, welcome. I appreciate you joining us.
Dennis Beauchesne (DB): Well, Doug, thank you very much for having me on. We’ve been talking about it for quite a while and I’m really glad we could finally get our schedules together to make this happen.
Photo Credit: ECM-USA
DG: We’re recording just after the holidays. Both of us are sobered up and back to be able to think clearly. We do want to talk about robotics, but just to give the listeners and/or viewers a sense of Dennis Beauchesne, your background, just briefly, tell us where you’ve come from and how long you’ve been working in the North American heat treat market.
DB: My name is Dennis Beauchesne. I am the general manager of ECM USA which is the U.S. subsidiary of ECM Technologies working out of France. I’ve been with ECM Technologies for almost 21 years. About 10 years before that I also worked with other furnace companies and some in the heat treat business as well as selling alloy baskets, fans, and those kinds of things. I also had a rep organization for 3 years where I sold probes and a number of other heat treat-related items. I’ve had my share of crawling around furnace and heat treats and getting to know the applications, loading mechanisms and all or most of the processes. I’m certainly not an expert on a lot of the heat treat processes, but one, in particular (low pressure vacuum carburizing and especially with gas quenching) is something that I’ve been working with for over 20 years, but certainly hardening and other applications, as well, and vacuum furnaces is our forte.
DG: Based on conversations you and I have had in the past, we started talking about robotics. It’s almost an element of Industry 4.0 to a certain extent- augmented reality, virtual reality, and things of that sort. Robotics definitely fits into that some, let’s talk about that a little bit.
From your perspective, what is ECM seeing as far as the use of robotics. I’m curious about industry in general, but if you want to narrow it down also and talk a little bit about where are you currently seeing robotics used in heat treat, that would be great.
DB: Robotics, in general, and automation. Automation has always been a leading technology for ECM USA and ECM Technologies, worldwide. A lot of our vacuum furnaces, as you know, are large scale, high production equipment as well as single chamber systems. But automation usually plays a part in our offering, and that, before, was conveyers, walking beam tables, rolling tables and those kinds of things, where we automated the process so that you would have, obviously, time control over the process, when the parts went to temper, etc.
What we’re seeing more and more, and the reason that I’m here today, is that ECM is very much involved with the robotics handling of parts before and after heat treatment as well. We’ve come across quite a few applications in the industry where these are required. You and I were just at some recent fall meetings, and labor availability is the number one issue in the world today, as we know. I really feel that robotics can do a lot to help in that area. Where we’ve seen robotics work is loading/unloading alloy fixtures, loading/unloading CFC fixtures, taking parts out of bins and putting them in heat treat fixtures, and then you have either operators move them to the furnaces or load them automatically through the automation system (conveyers, walking beams, etc.). We’ve done those systems, especially in Europe, we’ve done a number of systems there.
We are installing a system here, this summer, in North America, and it will be fully robotic-integrated. So, the customer brings us parts that will be in particular totes and we would be loading them into CFC fixtures. The fixtures will be retained in the heat treat area and then the parts will be unloaded after heat treat and then loaded back into their bins, totes, or containers.
This is a fully, completely automated process. It’s not that it’s the same part every time; there are actually 175 different parts. I think that’s a really important piece of information. And they’re not all gears, they’re not all shafts; there is a mixture of a bunch of different parts. It’s a very challenging application but also one that, with today’s technology in robotic vision systems, is a doable situation. We’re looking forward to showing off more of that.
DG: And that was one of my questions, especially when you mentioned 175 different types of parts. Is the system that you’re speaking about or are the systems that can be made by ECM or others, I assume they are going to use vision recognition, right? They’re not just going to say, “Well, I’m going to take my robotic arm and I’m going to this position where they tell me there is this type of part,” or is that arm actually going to be able to say, “That’s that type of part, therefore I treat it thusly.”
DB: I would say in this application, if people saw the loading/unloading, they would say, “Well, of course, the part’s going to be in the same location, it’s going to be in the same tote, it’s going to be in the same plastic locking device that it’s going to be every time.” This is true and it is very true in this application.
I think that’s one of the things that’s a challenge in the heat treat business, especially for heat treaters, not the captive operations but even in captive operations, is that parts come in in different forms- they’re in bins, they’re in tins, they’re in bins with plywood covers or plywood covers with cardboard covers, with bubble wrap, and all the things that you see across the marketplace.
As you mentioned, vision is a big, big part of robotics. Actually has some eyes for the robot to know there’s no part there, I’m not going to go get it, I change my program, I go here, or I twist the wrist of the robot a different way to pick up that part, whether it’s flat or round or whatever. Vision plays a big part. The advancements in vision and the robotics are huge, and have been huge, as they have been in vacuum furnace technology, as well, and gas quenching. Those things, moving forward, are a lot of the part of research and development at ECM and ECM USA. Things are moving forward.
DG: Before we get too deep into what, exactly, these robots are and how they work, I want to question you about the motivation for why people are using them. You mentioned about labor shortage being one of the main reasons. I’m assuming that there are some benefits there. Are these robots replacing people or are they assisting people? What do you see?
DB: I think it’s across the board for both. You are replacing people but not really replacing people that aren’t present. That’s part of the labor shortage is you don’t have people to replace. That’s part of the situation. We’re really adding to the capability, or the versatility, of that heat treat shop or captive heat treat by adding a robot or adding a person, if you want to look at it that way. But they’re also working together with the people, on the line or in the heat treat, to assist them.
You could have a robot that merely lifts a bin and moves it to another location where you’re helping a person not having to pick up such a heavy load. You also have robots that are placing parts precisely in a fixture or placing parts precisely in a bin, whereas the quality of that part is not impaired: you’re not dropping it or you’re not scratching it along with another part, you’re moving it very carefully like a customer would want to handle that particular part with higher quality.
I think, what was best taken from one of our fall sessions was that one of the presenters, [who] indicated they were using robots, said that in their process they were using this robot to do some of the heat treat and they said that they really no longer can do that heat treat process any more with a human because the robot was so precise at getting them heat correctly on that part for what they were doing. In that way, you are increasing the quality and the value of your heat treat and the robot integration.
DG: Right. The repeatability is the issue and the real advantage there: precise placement and processing of that item which even the best of us humans can’t do.
Realistically speaking, from ECM’s perspective, can you give us a sense of what the growth in interest in robotics has been? Let’s take a snapshot: 10 years ago, what was it like? What was it like 5 years ago? What is it today? What kind of growth are we seeing? What percentage of your RFPs/RFQs are actually asking for it?
DB: That’s a great question. I would say that 10 years ago there were very few opportunities or very few discussions about robotics. We would have robotics discussions with, let’s say, large automotive companies that were doing thousands of parts a week or year, and they would, mostly, at that time talk to outside robotics companies and try to integrate robotics into a heat treat market, where a lot of robotics companies would say, “You mean this surface is going to be warped? It’s going to be changed the next time I go to put that same part in that same location?”
I can tell you that it caused a lot of havoc in the heat treat business. Also, with just handling parts in and out of the heat treat load, whether it was a new heat load that was green, or a heat treat load that was already hard — handling those parts differently, especially in a gas quench situation, knowing that they’ve been processed or not — that was also a new development in robotics.
So, 5 years ago, I would say, you started seeing more people where there were several robotic companies that were out there that were starting to say, “Hey, we can handle this.” Vision was coming along a lot faster and there was more presence of vision with the robotics.
Today, I would say in the last 18 months to 2 years, we’ve seen a real uptick in RFPs and RFQs coming in where they’re looking to a company like ECM where we have a lot of experience in automation to further that arm to get robotics involved with not only just processing a load of parts, but taking the parts single piece, building a load and then processing that, and then giving the piece part back to the operations. That’s been increasing quite a bit.
In an effort to take care of that, about 5 years ago we had purchased a company that was doing a lot of robotics internally with their furnace systems in the semiconductor industry. We had a lot of robotic technical expertise in that. If you know that industry, you’re handling a lot of thin parts and a lot of movement, very high volume, and also there is a lot of vision that’s being used in that and also vision in the quality control afterwards, as well.
So, we’re seeing requests for robots loading and unloading. We’re seeing requests for robots picking up parts, putting them in front of the camera, and actually measuring the part for distortion control. We’re also seeing parts that are being automatically hardness tested before they’re put into the finish part bins or totes, or wherever the next stage of processing is.
DG: I assume, at that point in time, they’re able to separate the sheep from the goats, so to speak. Well hardened, not well hardened, and that type of thing.
DB: Exactly. There are a lot more automated systems for process quality control, as well, as the parts come out of the furnace.
DG: Let me ask you this question: When some people think of robots, we start thinking of the Jetson’s or something like that, but I think most people with their feet on the ground and their head’s not in the clouds too much, when we think of robots, I tend to think of that robotic arm, that type of thing, right? Where it’s a stationary robot, if you will, with functions within its reach. Is this the type of robot we’re talking about now, is that what is most common, or do you anticipate that there’s going to be those, let’s say, “mobile” robots that are roaming around doing things, helping workers, or are they exoskeleton-type robots that are on the backs of people? I’m curious what your prognosticating is on that point.
DB: A very good question, again. When we look at robotics moving parts around the plant, we usually call those AGVs, or automatic guided vehicles. We’re working on a number of projects with those types of facilities and that reduces a lot of traffic, internally, for people moving forklifts arounds and it becomes a much safer facility.
DG: And these are not on tracks, right? They’re not on monorails or railroad tracks, it’s just free moving?
DB: Tracks are a thing of the past, now, with AGVs. There are a number of different ways of doing it. I’m not an AGV specialist, or a robotics specialist for that matter, but they do have AGVs now that are controlled by cameras up in the plant so that the cameras know exactly where the AGV is and is located.
Photo Credit: ECM-USA
There are also ways of putting tape down or some other line in the concrete where the AGV can follow. Those methods are out there for AGVs. Usually, the AGVs are used in some of the situations we’re into right now. They’re used to promote the accurate takt time through the plant. Whether they need a part every 20 minutes or every 10 minutes, it’s well designed in that fashion. There are usually tracks or pallets that are on these AGVs that move from machining center to heat treat center to post-machining heat treat center. Those things are very much out there. AGVs have, also, grown leaps and bounds, as well, in their own right.
As far as the robot being stationary or, as you spoke about, working together with other operators in a collaborative fashion, both of these methods are being used, of course. But we still see that the larger, single-arm robot, let’s say, can be multifaceted.
In other words, we can have 3 or 4 handling devices or grippers, as we would say, on the end of this robot. It could be picking up a part, then picking up a tray, then picking up a full load, with the same gripper or same handset that’s on the gripper. These are multifaceted robots. You’re not really looking at every time you need to pick up a different part you need to have a different tool. That’s what’s being done with those, as well as trying to reduce the footprint and making a much safer robot system with the collaborative design where, if you touch it, it stops. In addition, robot programming, also, has become far less tedious, let’s say, or far less required from a specific person to do the programming.
"In other words, we can have 3 or 4 handling devices or grippers, as we would say, on the end of this robot. It could be picking up a part, then picking up a tray, then picking up a full load, with the same gripper or same handset that’s on the gripper. These are multifaceted robots."
DG: And you mentioned the word I wanted to ask you about which is probably the hot topic, and we’ll have to make sure the lawyers get involved here. What about safety? It’s not just the mobile AGVs, I think you said, that are afraid of running somebody over or hitting somebody, but it’s also these stationary ones that have moving parts. Are there any safety concerns? What can you tell us about the safety and the advances in safety?
DB: Well, of course, safety is always a very, very important part. We’re trying to eliminate workers by not having to pick these parts, but we still need to be safe in that environment. There are a number of ways. A lot of people are trying to get away from the full cages with light curtains and those kinds of things. Using the collaborative robots, where they’re touch-sensitive and can be shut off instantaneously, are probably the best way to go. With the AGVs running through the plant, there are a number of sensor systems on those AGVs that would stop them, as well as they move at a very slow pace, as well, throughout the plant.
There are a number of safety devices depending on the installation. Whether it’s a stand-alone system or it’s something working collaboratively with a person, safety is always important and can be working, l would say, much more advantageous these days with other workers.
DG: In one sense, there are people who resist robotics because they may be afraid of it replacing people or hurting people and things of that sort, but in a sense, the whole advantage here is that ultimately it is better for the human worker to have these machines doing it. Typically, the robotics are taking away some of the redundant, tedious work. Would you agree with that?
DB: I agree and that’s typically what we discuss with the customers. It’s where in your plan do you have difficulty hiring people to work? I would say 90% of those customers answer: I can’t hire anybody for a long period of time when they’re taking the part from a bin and putting it in a fixture or taking a part out of the fixture and replacing it in the bin properly. They say that those people last a few months, and they move on. The worst case is if you have someone that’s been there a long time and you put them in that position, it’s a negative for them. They finally feel like, “okay, they’ve got something on me and I have to go down and build loads.”
Like you said, people are thinking about robots and they’re a little bit hesitant, but I would say that, and maybe you’ll get to this question but, it’s more the possibilities and the way people think about robots. I would have to say the most that I’ve heard, especially from heat treaters, is, “Well, it’s not going to do what I need it to do.” “I can’t use a robot because I don’t have that many of the same part every year.” Really, that is changing. What we’re planning on doing is having a demo site here, hopefully before the end of this year, where we could have certain bins of parts and show how, with vision, we can pick up different parts and put them in heat treat loads and move them around.
DG: Let’s go there because that actually was a question I wanted to ask: To a certain extent, we’re limited in our willingness to use robotics because we’re probably limited in our understanding of what they can do. I’m quite sure, as much as ECM has dedicated resources to developing current capabilities, there are some dreamers in your group that say, “You know, we could get robots to this if only someone would say ‘okay’.” Can you share with us maybe some of the things that you are currently doing that are a little "cutting edge" or at least useful to our captive heat treaters? And also, some of those things that could be done? I’m curious as to the extent of where we might be able to go in the next 10 years.
DB: I am, even myself, learning as we go along, as well, of the technologies that are out there. What I’m impressed with robotics is they not only help once they’re installed, but before the concept is even put together. I’ve put on VR glasses and walked through a heat treat and you can understand exactly what the robot’s function is, what it sees, where it goes. We can actually also walk through a furnace installation and see what the height of everything is, what the level of everything is, how it moves around. Those are some of the applications even before you get the robot installed.
The other possibilities that people do think that “Oh, this is going to be expensive, first of all." They think it’s not going to work on my parts in my situation. There will be some concessions that everybody is going to need to make. For instance, the heat treat fixtures, maybe the ones that are really warped, you’re going to have to not use those as much anymore. Or, you may have to a more standard basket or a more standard fixture for all the parts. You may not get your million parts in one load (like everybody wants to get), but you would get them done more efficiently and faster.
Some of the applications we’ve done where we’ve taken very thin ceramic material and put it on setters and put them in some brazing furnaces and sintering furnaces, and then move the loads around, unstack the load, stack the load, restack the load, and done that all completely in a robotic cell, without touching the parts, ever. And then, as the parts come out, they’re electrically tested to make sure they’re good.
Like I said, in this other application or several other applications, we’ve also done bulk filling of CFC fixtures. You would have a CFC fixture that needed to be bulk loaded with small pieces, we actually have them go through a vibrating machine, fill the CFC fixture to a certain level, the robot comes over and puts a screen on top, moves the CFC fixture onto a heat treat load and does that continuously.
DG: Is that done by weight or by vision?
DB: Both. Because you can have the weight, but you may not have it even.
DG: Right, the distribution -- it would vibrate it out until it’s acceptable and then the screen would come in.
DB: Exactly. And, like I said, the possibilities of heat treat robotics is what it’s coming down to. Heat treat robotics, today, is to educate and have everybody understand that it is and could be capable of taking flat parts out of bins and putting them in fixtures properly and removing them and doing the reverse action. We need to educate people that these things are available out there. And it doesn’t have to be any particular type of furnace or any particular type of size of load of the furnace, it is a matter of setting up a station, maybe a loading/unloading station that you might have an area in your plant, to do the robotic handling of it, with our expertise in heat treating, understanding the facets of what happens to the parts and the fixtures during the heat treat process.
Those are the kinds of things that we see. Like I said, right from the design of the system and the layout, understanding how everything is going to work on a VR standpoint, all the way to implementation in a facility that takes in many different parts on a daily basis and processes them. I think that’s true to form in what’s moving forward in robotics today.
DG: I want to throw this one at you and see what your input is on this: Let’s think about robotics for the whole way through a process. I want to think, just for a minute, about a mesh belt furnace, let’s say. I know you guys do a lot in vacuum and things of that sort, but it could be the same type of thing.
Could we use, on the frontend, robotics to do, not only placement of the product, but product inspection, let’s say, making sure it’s a clean surface (with nitriding, for example), making sure impurities are off and things of that sort? I assume we could us robotics on that end to inspect the product, making sure it’s good to go in the basket, then we put it in the basket or in the fixture, goes through the furnace, comes out the other end, is picked up and inspected at that time for whether it be hardness or distortion or whatever, and then placed on where it needs to go. I assume all that’s possible, correct?
DB: You assume and yes, it is possible. I, personally, haven’t seen anybody install that particular system, but I would love to be part of it. We have designed a system and quoted on a system that was using a mesh belt where the customer of the heat treat department felt that the parts (these were coin-shaped type parts) and it felt better that the parts were processed better vertically rather than just in a pile on the belt.
So, these parts were put in small fixtures on the belt (and this fixture was maybe 6" x 6" and took up a 4'-wide belt) and those were loaded in place very properly and then also on the outside on the outlet of the furnace belt were also unloaded. Then, of course, the design was for them to inspect them by coloration and then also by hardness. And I didn’t share that with you before this meeting, but that was one application that we quoted on and it’s something that is very doable.
DG: A couple final questions for you: We talked earlier about the companies who, for example, if they high diversity of product and not high quantity of those products, I assume, and you’ve mentioned it, that robotics probably is not as likely to be helpful to them as to a company who has low variability of products but high volume of those products. Do you have any comments on that? For example, a commercial heat treater who does all kinds of crazy things and doesn’t have a lot of any one thing, is it safe to say robotics probably would not be as useful to them?
DB: I would have to say that that is the thought that we’re trying to change. We’re trying to change that thought because I’ve sat at a number of tables during the lunches and dinners at some of these presentations and that’s exactly what I hear from the heat treaters: “Robotics isn’t for me; I don’t do enough of the same part.” In reality, a lot of these robotics systems now are easily programmable by grabbing the gripper and moving it to where you want it to go. And if you have repeatable parts (maybe you don’t have a hundred million of these parts in the same month, but maybe you have ten thousand of them over 12 months) once that’s programmed in the robot, then you have that program for the next time. There may be some initial programming time that you have to apply to it. We don’t see that that is a big downside because the vision system will understand what the part looks like before the robot picks it up. The programming has become much easier and simpler for everybody so that you don’t have to have a big staff just to take care of the robots.
I think that’s the other misnomer that companies have is that if I get a robot, I not only have to pay for the robot, but I must have the five support-staff for that robot, when, in fact, that is not something that’s becoming a thing. In one of the cases, the same person that was talking about the quality of the robot was also talking about the excitement of his team to work with the robot and to be able to learn to program that robot, and that being their job rather than loading and unloading the fixtures. To them, that was more exciting and made them come to work, wanting to come to work every day, and was also a lead-in for them to hire more people, to say, “Hey, we’re implementing robotics in the plant and as an opportunity to work in that department eventually or eventually we’ll bring robotics into your department.” There are those incentives, as well, with some of the employees.
DG: You may have hinted at this before: You’re saying that programming of the robots, sometimes, can be as easy as showing it what to do by moving it, saying, “Here’s what you do: Grab this, put this here, grab this, put this here." That’s as easy as it can be?
DB: It’s becoming that way, yes. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve seen a lot of demos, as a lot of other people have, but yes, those things are possible. Get it in a general location and then you tweak it a little bit here and there- yes, those things are much easier to do.
DG: Probably, to say to those who are "robotic doubters," let’s say, it would be good to not assume it’s as difficult as what you might think and to keep an open mind.
Let me ask you this: You could be a commercial heat treater, but most of our audience or a lot of our audience are the manufacturers with their own in-house heat treat or what we call captive heat treaters. What questions should they be asking themselves about robotics, whether or not it makes sense for them? Is there a list of questions they ought to be asking or considering before they even consider robotics?
DB: I think that when you’re doing repetitive operations in your facilities, whether it’s captive or heat treat shop, that’s where you get the most benefit from a robotic system, obviously. That’s one thing. The other one is: Are you doing similar operations in that repetitiveness? Are you always building the same type of fixture? Are you always building it for the same furnace load? Those things.
"The more similarities you can get that robot to work with, the more cost effective it becomes. But there are also a lot of benefits to having that robot be very versatile in working with a number of different size furnace loads as well as part dimensions."
The more similarities you can get that robot to work with, the more cost effective it becomes. But there are also a lot of benefits to having that robot be very versatile in working with a number of different size furnace loads as well as part dimensions. I can’t say that there’s a specific set of questions, but certainly would love to work with any customer that has even a thought that maybe they should look into this.
DG: I think the high repeatability is critical. I would imagine, Dennis, that if they’re dealing with high-value parts, even if there’s not a huge number of them, and they’re looking to eliminate the potential for human error, even if it’s simply in the placement of that product or if they’re looking for single-part traceability, perhaps, robotic systems, definitely, it seems to me, would be also something that would be of interest.
DB: Absolutely. In-process defects is something that it would be very good at eliminating. Also, as you said, if you were looking for traceability, I can tell you that we can build a robot system that can trace, even if you have 500 parts in a heat treat load, it can tell you exactly where that part came from in the load, where you put it in the load, where it came from and where it went after it came off of the heat treat rack.
Traceability is a good point that I didn’t bring up, thank you for that, Doug. Traceability is really important, as well- we can do that with the furnaces. And that’s for a single-piece part flow whereas a lot of people are going to that method. A single piece gets to the heat treat furnace, not a bin of parts. Then, you can trace every part through the heat treat load and back out of it.
DG: The other thought I was having while you were talking was, and this may be only in a number of very minor cases, but a lot of times there are situations where a part has got to come out of a hot furnace, it’s got to cool off in order to be moved to the next process — it seems to me with any type of automation, robotics included, you could eliminate the amount of heat loss between furnace one and temper furnace or the next process.
DB: I think another application is operating press quenches where you’re moving a hot part over the end of a furnace and moving it over to a quench, it’s an extremely hot part that you don’t want to touch. Obviously, there are gantry systems for that and there are a number of robot systems that can be installed to get those people out of those hazardous jobs. Also, in terms of quality because timing is very important, as well.
Photo Credit: ECM-USA
DG: You mentioned about maintenance of these systems a little bit, or at least the programming of them. I’m assuming maintenance is somewhat of an issue. If there are moving parts and things of that sort, there is probably going to be some maintenance on it, whether it be hardware maintenance and/or software maintenance. Any comments on the amount of money or time that a person would spend maintaining these systems as opposed to maintaining a human being doing those systems?
DB: That’s a very good question, again, and it should be something that’s part of your machine maintenance. It is a machine tool; it is going to need some maintenance, so it’s part of your maintenance requirements. If people use this same maintenance priority that they do for the heat treat furnaces, thank goodness robots work really well, as well, in hazardous environments. I would say that they hold up very well. Robots have been around a number of years and they’re very industrialized. Maintenance is not as critical as it used to be, but it is, obviously, still required.
DG: And I’m sure they can handle the environments, too. Hopefully, the environments in the heat treat shops are getting better and not so smokey and oily and that type of thing. I’m assuming that any robots you put in would be able to handle whatever environment it’s in.
DB: That would be part of the requirements, as well.
DG: Any concluding thoughts? Anything I’ve missed that you want to hit on, Dennis?
DB: When you think, “Robotics isn’t for me,” spend a little time and look into it. I’ve been blown away with the technology of today. Look at our cellphones — they aren’t even phones anymore. We use them for many, many more things than just a phone. Robotics have come to be that way, as well. There are so many more things that can be used in conjunction with the robotics to help you get your job done and service your customer appropriately and with good quality parts.
DG: I’ve got one other question I just thought of: I perceive that a lot of times companies in Europe are a bit ahead of us on technology or at least the adoption of some of these technologies. With ECM, the mothership of which being in France, are you seeing that there is a wider acceptance of robotics from companies in Europe than here in the States?
DB: I wouldn’t call it acceptance, but there are many more applications and customers looking into it in Europe than there are here, yes. I think that, maybe, we haven’t realized that the people aren’t there we’re not going to find them. Then, I think in Europe, where they realized, even just a few years ago, that they’re just not going to find these people and they need to automate. Or the operators that they can find are not going to get the job done the way they need it to get it done because technology has grown so fast with the quality of the parts necessary, especially with EV products today, dropping a part or having a part nicked by something, or even continuous productivity is important.
So, yes, we’ve seen more in Europe, and that’s another reason we’ve been on the leading edge of this technology and now bringing it to the U.S. in North America in a more simpler fashion with the same people having this inexperience as over in Europe.
DG: Being somewhat facetious, the other things robots give you that humans don’t is they don’t have to pass drug tests. I’m pretty sure that the robots are okay.
DB: They don’t have to pass drug tests and they don’t have to get COVID tests either!
Quenching is typically associated with oil, water, or high pressure gas quenching. But Bill Disler from AFC-Holcroft suggests that we not forget about salt quenching. It is good and it is green. Listen as he and Heat TreatRadio host, Doug Glenn, walk through the benefits and drawbacks of an oft-forgotten form of quenching.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn (DG): First time, welcome to Heat TreatRadio.
Bill Disler (BD): Thank you very much, Doug.
DG: It’s good to have you and it’s about time we had you here. I’m pretty sure, this is your first time on Heat TreatRadio, but you’ve written several articles for us, all of which have been very well received, so we appreciate that.
If you don’t mind, give our listeners a brief introduction to yourself and your history in the heat treat industry.
Doug Glenn, host of Heat Treat Radio, and Bill Disler, president and CEO of AFC-Holcroft, talk about the goodness and greenness of salt quenching.
BD: Sure. I started out in heat treat back in 1987 I’ve been in the industry for quite a while. I came out of college with an electrical engineering and math computer science degree and ended up working at Holcroft back then. After a short period of time as an electrical engineer, I ended up over in China helping debug some control systems and my 6-week stint turned into 2 years. It gave me a jump start with some appreciation hands-on with furnaces, building furnaces, pushers, continuous and batch and rotaries.
Over the years, I’ve done quite a few different things from managing an advanced controls group, estimating sales and had a little stint outside of heat treat with a German company called Dürr (when Holcroft was going through some ownership transitions) and that gave me a little bit of a nice perspective, I think, outside of heat treat, so when I came back to AFC-Holcroft (after they acquired Holcroft), it opened my eyes to some things. I love the heat treat world, but we’re not always the fastest moving with technology, so that gave me a little bit of an insight with what the automation lines for building engine blocks and heads and things were all about.
Along the way, I was president of ALD-Holcroft, which was a joint venture between ALV (the German vacuum carburizing group) that gave me a lot of insight into a different form of process where mainly atmosphere and vacuum carburizing and gas quench. On the way through the journey, I ended up in the corner office at AFC-Holcroft. I’m still an engineer and a little bit of a sales guy at heart, I think.
DG: How long have you been president of AFC-Holcroft?
BD: That’s a good question. I think it’s been about 8-9 years now. From before we went through the transition with the acquisition into the AICHELIN Group, which happened in July of 2016, which is already almost 5 years, I guess, and several years before that.
DG: Good, and you’re out of Wixom, Michigan in the Detroit area.
BD: We have plenty of global entities and partners, but home base for the engineering team and me is Wixom, Michigan. It is not very far from where Holcroft started in downtown Detroit in 1960.
DG: Let’s jump into our topic today. We’re going to talk about quenching. Heat Treat Today has down a lot of different articles on various types of quenching, most of them have been focusing in on either high pressure gas quenching, oil quenching, and maybe some polymer water type quenching. We’re going to talk, today, primarily about salt quenching, but, if you don’t mind, give us the 30,000-foot view on some of those more chic, popular, newer types of quenching, if you would.
BD: Quenching, obviously, is for our customers and our listening group and, I assume, one of the most critical things in a lot of our heat treat processes. Since I’ve been involved in heat treat, which has been a few years, there has always been focus on different types of medias to quenchant. Over the years, I’ve come to look at quenching as a basic thermal heat transfer process. As we talk about salt eventually, we can talk about some of the other processes and some of the fundamentals that people don’t always understand about, say, oil. Frankly, we, and the general population of people that carburize and quench, generally it’s oil that’s the common quenchant. It is still, far and away, the most popular from anything else out there. Oil is a very flexible quenchant. It’s tried and proved. It’s predictable. But it does have one challenge and, I think, this ties into the evolution into gas quenchant.
The challenge with oil is it boils. As you take a hot part and put it into oil, the reason we all focus of quench agitation, too much speed and too little, is to try to take the oil past the part before it boils. The reality is you just can’t do that. You can help it, but there is always going to be a vapor phase. The challenge with that is the non-even heating of heat transfer into a liquid versus heat transfer into a gas is significantly different. You’ve got two phases with oil that you’re quenching the parts into. What’s probably the most common concern with quenching is distortion.
Over time, I think, that’s the introduction of gas quench. The evolution of trying to control distortion is mainly from oil, I’ll call it a two-phase quench, where you have liquid, heat transfer and a gaseous heat transfer taking place to a single-phase quench. When you compress gas, it’s already a gaseous phase. If you get into an 18-bar quench, say, the higher the pressure, the better the heat transfer, but it’s a single-phase quench which means, generally, you don’t have that big differential and temperature when you’re quenching parts, so your distortion tends to improve.
The challenge with gas quenching is that even at higher pressures, 18-bar or reasonable pressures, in a cold chamber going from a hot chamber to a cold chamber quench (like on the larger systems that are used in some of the automotive gears) the heat transfer coefficient is still not very good so you’re just not able to take enough heat away fast.
That was really the big evolution in the introduction of gas quenching, which I tend to talk about separate from vacuum carburizing. But the gas quench element was all about distortion control. Transmission gears in automotive, they were hoping to go from oil quench, where they had to get the distortion and hard grind them (which is very expensive), to gas quench and then they wouldn’t have to grind. The reality is, generally, they still grind today, but the gas is a better heat transfer media when it comes to distortion in oil because it’s single-phase. It just can’t take a lot of heat out fast. That’s where we’re seeing salt come back into the picture, even for martensitic-type quenches.
If we look at that evolution, we went from oil to gas quench for distortion, but now, a lot of the challenges people are seeing are that the heat transfer rate limitations (you’ve got to go to very light trays and carbon fiber fixtures and things like this) it’s got its limitations. Also, for certain parts, it could just be too thick to take the heat away quick enough to be successful. The other big thing is, it’s not cheap. You’ve got very complex high-pressure chambers, 300-horse motors and so on.
DG: Right. You’re sucking down the electricity, we know that for sure, with the high horsepower motors, typically.
BD: Yes, and unfortunately, they must cycle. In a big plant, it’s one thing having a lot of power consumption, but it’s another thing where you have these high horsepower motors starting and stopping all the time. It’s not usually things that our customers like, but clearly, it’s an acceptable heat transfer quench system, and for the right set of parts, it can be a very good fit. I think that we’ve gone through an evolution where a lot of customers went from one type of quenching into this and we’re seeing a lot more activity with them saying, “Wow, you know, we really like the distortion control, but what else is there?” This is where salt starts coming back into the mix.
DG: Which is what we really want to talk about. I think that’s probably a good segue, Bill, to get over into it. Salt quenching. What is it? I don’t know that a lot of people use it, so please explain it for the uninformed.
BD: A lot of people I’ve known in the heat treat industry for a long time, when I bring up salt, they ask, “Why are you bringing up salt? That’s nasty stuff. We don’t want to use that.” First, I guess I should start out saying we’re talking about salt quenching. Historically, when people talk about salt, they talk about high temperature salts, as well, that had cyanide and things like this in it. Nasty animals.
DG: For salt bath heat treating, is how you’re heating it up, but we’re not talking about that.
BD: Correct, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about using conventional atmospheric equipment and then quenching instead of oil or polymer or gas or something else and taking it into molten salt.
I’d say, in general, the most common thoughts with salt are to use it for bainitic quenching. If you’re quenching into a bainitic structure, salt has always been the only way to do this.
“If you’re quenching into a bainitic structure, salt has always been the only way to do this.” -Bill Disler Photo Credit: Metallurgy For Dummies
The reason is you can take it up into the temperatures where you form bainite, which I’ll say is often 600 or 700°Fahrenheit, where they’re using salt to quench into a bainitic structure versus martensite which is a lot of our conventional heat treat. I’ll call it a bit of a specialized process, but it’s very common. All your spring steels and a ton of parts are better bainitically quenched.
In general, you’ll see a lot of mesh belts doing stamped parts in a molten salt. Most of those are in the bainite — spring clips, retaining clips and things like that. But you also have batch systems that have the ability to quench into salt-type environments. Still, I’d say the majority are in the bainitic quench. But what we’re seeing the growth into, and much more activity, is martensitic quench. I’ll just say “transmission gears” for the sake of an example. What people might not realize, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to name the company, but one of the big three in the day, an American automotive company, prior to going to gas quenching, back in carburizing, all of their transmission gears were quenched into salt. Rows and rows of pusher furnaces into salt quench to get martensite. The benefit of that, that they saw -- and I’ll say that these lines were built in the ‘70s and the ‘60s -- so this isn’t new, they were using molten salt to get martensitic quenching in transmission gears because it was less distortion than oil. Then, their evolution was to go into with some of the German dual clutch transmissions came gas quenching.
Interestingly enough, some of those folks are now saying, “Wow, that was really expensive. I’ve got this equipment for 10+ years and maybe I should revisit some of the other stuff that used to give us the same distortion in martensitic.” This, I think, is the journey that salt has gone through. It is not a new process; it’s been around for a lot longer than I’ve been in the business. But it does have a stigma of "dirty" which is, I think, maybe unfair. And, if it’s confused with high-temperature salts, then it has an environmentally unfriendly feel to it.
DG: I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the “greenness” of it in just a second.
You’ve given us a sense that it’s been around for quite a while, salt, and salt quenching, but let’s talk about some of the advantages.
BD: To me, sometimes it’s easier for somebody to be able to visualize what’s happening in a quench and then these pieces fall into place. Let’s say you used the example of parts with significantly different thicknesses. They can be challenging for any kind of quench media. But the big thing that causes distortion and can cause different problems is the vapor phase of oil. So, we’re going to compare to oil. If you think about the things that happen when you get a vapor film or some bubbling on the surface of a part, it’s all about uneven heat transfer. I use the example of — if you want to take something out of your freezer and thaw it, you have to sit it on your kitchen counter in the air and how long will it take to thaw or put it in some water. It’s a radical difference in heat transfer between a gas and a liquid. This is what happens when you get a film boiling with oil. We do a lot of things to minimize that, that’s quench agitation. But if you have a big, thick piece of material here and a thin piece here, this is going to give up its heat quick really quick, this one may not. You’ve got to get into the core that you’re still taking heat out. There’s a heat transfer rate and I’d say that salt, at a quenching temperature of maybe 350 degrees, is going to have, roughly, about the same heat transfer rate as oil. It’s not about heat transfer as much as the fact that it is all uniformly cool.
Even if the heat treat transfer coefficients of oil versus salt were similar, the reality is, in a quench you’re not getting the liquid heat transfer rate in oil in all aspects of the part, and so those areas cool much slower, where salt won’t boil. That’s the key: salt doesn’t boil in the temperatures we’re dealing with so it’s always a liquid heat transfer rate.
DG: Right. In a sense, with oil, you think you’re dumping it into a liquid, but the fact of the matter is, for some fractions of a second or fractions of a minute, you actually have a gas quench going on there, if you will, because of the vapor, right? You’ve got an insulating layer there that is preventing the liquid from actually hitting the metal, so you’re getting ununiform quenching.
BD: Yes. Let’s say you’ve got a ring gear or something. Like everybody, you’ve got flow of oil coming into the bottom. You might be getting nice liquid heat transfer here, but what’s on the other side where you’ve got a little less flow and you’ve got a bigger vapor barrier on that side and, guess what? that’s what makes the gear bed. So, whether or not we’re talking about a gas quench or a salt quench, the characteristics of the quenchant are the same, they’re a single phase and that brings a huge amount of benefits in heat transfer. You could talk about something like a “blind hole,” it’s hard to quench a blind hole. As an example, it’s hard to carburize or quench a blind hole. That’s one thing. Let’s say, for instance, in a blind hole, a good argument for vacuum carburizing, if that’s a big issue and you need to carburize inside of it, because vacuum carburizing can probably get inside more than endo. But when it comes to quenching, they’re hard to get into either way, but imagine oil getting into a hole that’s very hot.
What’s going to happen? You’re going to get boiling in that hole. I’m not saying that salt’s going to cure all those problems, but you don’t have it boiling trying to get into the hole. You’ve still got to get the fluid into the hole, which is a problem, but you don’t have the vapor that’s pushing it back out. In those cases, it’s very much a case by case. I think that the physics of salt, and if people can visualize what’s happening when you’re quenching, it’s not magic, it’s just that it’s a single-phase quench and that brings a lot of benefits. It’s a single-phase quench with much better heat transfer rates than, say, 18-bar nitrogen. This is where you can use it in places where you can’t gas quench a part. If you’ve got a thicker part and you can’t get the heat out of it in the gas quench, you may very well be able to get the distortion benefits from salt, but still get the heat transfer rate that you need to quench out the part.
DG: One of the things you mentioned, Bill, with oil, was that the reason you engage in a lot of the stirring of the quench, the agitation, and things of that sort, is to help keep that to, hopefully, eliminate the vapor stage and keep the oil flowing over the part, so that helps with the distortion. Do you have to do the same thing agitation-wise with salt or do you do the same thing with salt? Do you agitate to quench, as well?
BD: We still want to be moving the salt past the parts just like any media. It’s not as much a worry about boiling, but we’re still transferring heat into the salt. You want to take that heat and move it away from the parts. Agitation is the vehicle to do that. You were talking about uniformity before, the tank uniformity of a salt quench versus an oil quench, it’s all about the same. We can hold uniformity throughout. The bigger thing is instantaneous temperature rise with the quench which is a different topic which is really a function of the volume of the tank. I’d say, we still want to move, in most cases -- and it’s not as sensitive if you’re in a mesh belt where you’re dropping parts down through a tank, you might not need that agitation -- but, in a batch or a fixtured, continuous load, we definitely would want to still agitate the salt.
DG: Primarily, to keep the cooler salt, if you will, coming by which therefore can increase your heat exchange and heat extraction.
BD: Right. Your heat transfer rate would stay constant because you’ve got the same temperature salt through it.
DG: I’ve got one other quick question: Oil quench runs typically at what temperature? What temperature do you keep the oil quench bath and what temperature do you keep the salt quench? Are they roughly the same?
BD: No, they can be significantly different. It depends on lots of things, but I’ll say that we typically see oil running from 120–150°Fahrenheit up to 350°Fahrenheit. In fact, we’ve had customers run over 400°Fahrenheit with special oil, but generally, you’re up into the flashpoint of the oil and it’s not really a great idea. Those are all martensitic quenches. Remember, oil can’t get you bainite; you can’t go high enough in temperature to get a bainitic quench. If you’re quenching it to bainite in salt, which is still very common, you’re above the martensite start point for materials which, of course, depends on the alloying of the material, call it 400°Fahrenheit, roughly.
Above those temperatures, salts are very comfortable, and they’ll run up to 800° with no practical limit, but there is no need to go much higher than that for bainite. If you wanted to get into martensitic quenches, you’re going to be down around the 300-degree temperatures. You can’t go to lower temperatures with salt. Your realistic lower point would be about 300° which I tell anybody looking at it, you’ve really got to look at your parts, your alloy and everything else to make sure it’s still a fit. But, in most cases, that can give people what they’re looking for. It’s not a “one size fits all.”
DG: Right. That was one of my questions: Just how low can you go?
BD: You could, arguably, go down to maybe 250, but the lower temperature salts don’t behave that well, so I’d say probably in the 300–350° range. That is also probably for a customer that is looking to optimize distortion control, as long as they can get the hardenability at those temperatures of their materials and so on. That’s probably the sweet point for trying to minimize distortion. But it is always a balancing act because you’re still at a temperature that is higher than some of the colder oils. There could be some parts that simply may not be a great fit, that’s why we have to look at them on a case by case.
"The other big thing that’s very important is that in the current systems, we reclaim close to 99% of the salt. If you look at an oil quench, you go into an oil quench, you come out, you wash the oil off, and it ends up in a washer kind of messy and homogenized and we have skimmers of various types and then you get this sludge that you must get rid of." - Bill Disler, AFC-Holcroft
DG: Another thought that jumps to mind is that you don’t have a flash point with salt, I assume.
BD: Not in the temperatures we’re working with.
DG: Is salt quenching green?
BD: Yes. As we said before, I think the first reaction of the average listener when I say, “yes” is: That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about! We’re dealing sodium nitrite/sodium nitrate salts. I won’t go so far as to say it is exactly what your table salt is, but it is not that different. There is no cyanide in it, there are no "nasties" in it. Depending on where you are, small quantities can probably go down the drain, some places not. You’re not going to dump down a bunch, obviously, but it is not like oil.
The other big thing that’s very important is that in the current systems, we reclaim close to 99% of the salt. If you look at an oil quench, you go into an oil quench, you come out, you wash the oil off, and it ends up in a washer kind of messy and homogenized and we have skimmers of various types and then you get this sludge that you must get rid of. With salt, you’ll come out of the quench with some liquid salt on it, you’ll go into a washer but that salt then dissolves back into the water. Generally, there is a multiphase wash with a wash/rinse/rinse. Then, after we get a certain percentage of salt in the wash solution, we thermally evaporate the water off leaving the salt back where it can be reintroduced into the quench tank. When you look at it from that standpoint, salt is reclaimed.
Oil, unless you’re really getting into high-tech thermal recovery for oil, is not friendly to get rid of. The other thing is, you’re recycling your salt. You’ve got to load it up once, but you don’t have the life expectancy problems, typically, with salt. You can rejuvenate it, you can mix your balances over time. Oil, yes, you can recycle oil and do additives, but if someone is picky about their heat treat, after a year or two, you better be dumping the oil and starting all over again. Where does that oil go? It’s contaminated oil. From an environmentally friendly standpoint, as ironic as it sounds to some people, salt is a very, very green process. We recycle almost all of it.
DG: On-site, too. It sounds like when you’re recycling or reusing it, you’re able to do most of that on-site whereas a lot of people are sending oils out, right? They’ve got to send them out, get them tested and all that good stuff.
BD: Yes, this is all on-site, so you have a recovery system, whether it’s a batch or a continuous-type operation, you can recover the salt. From an environmental standpoint, it is much greener. We’re trying to let people know that because there is a lot of movement to environmentally friendly heat treat, whether we start seeing more electric furnaces or not, we’ll see, but the carbon footprint has to be looked at, but quenchant is one of them that has a bad rap.
DG: Yes. I was watching the other day about the first batch of completely green steel was delivered to a car company and manufactured--or maybe it was an off-road vehicle company like Caterpillar or somebody like that--and they had made their first fully "green" piece of equipment from green steel that came from somebody. But you’re right, the point being: green is here.
BD: Green is here. That’s a bit of the benefit, I would say, over oil to gas quench, as well. I think we’ll be seeing more. All of the people in the furnace manufacturing world will soon be delivering carbon footprint data on furnace information. A lot of our customers are already looking for that. It’s already in Europe, but it’s coming to the U.S. as well. What’s interesting is we start comparing our experience with LPC and gas quench. With electricity, now we’re tracking to where you’re making the electricity. If it’s from a coal plant or a natural gas plant, there is still a carbon footprint to it. I think as we unravel these complicated topics, it will be interesting to see how well conventional atmosphere, and something like salt, fairs in that comparison.
It’s interesting, but people forget, even with vacuum furnaces, which we’ve built quite a few of, they are water cooled. Water cooling and pumping water through stuff that you have to put additives in and everything else is not environmentally friendly. The irony is, over my career in atmosphere furnaces, there has been an ongoing push to get all the water off of the furnace. It used to be water cooled fans, water cooled doorframes; I don’t want any of that now. It’s all air cooled. Even endo-generators. Then, here you go in this new environmentally green system and you’re pumping tons of water around. As we started doing some comparisons with salt, oil, and all of the other systems that we offer, it is coming out interesting what is really green and what the perception has been out there.
DG: I think that’s generally true for most of the green movement is what’s perceived to be green and what might really be green is a different thing. If you read in our August issue, we had a column by Lourenco Goncalves who is the chairman/president/CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs and he had very interesting things to say about what people think is green and what really is green.
What’s perceived to be green and what might really be green is a different thing. Like Kermit the frog said, "It’s not easy being green!" Photo Credit: LoggaWiggler at Pixabay.com
BD: It’s an interesting topic and a sensitive one. We’ll be hearing more about it, I’m sure.
DG: On a completely serious note, here: When I graduated from high school in 1980, our class song was Kermit frog singing "It’s Not Easy Being Green." Now we know, it isn’t easy, actually! Most companies will tell you, it’s not so easy. So, Kermit had something there. He was a man (frog?) ahead of his time.
One other environmental question for you about the salt quenching: How about the work environment around salt? Is there off gassing? Is there anything hazardous to workers near it? If you work near a salt bath furnace, forget it, come in with a facemask on. But how about salt quenching?
BD: We’ve got an austemper heat treat (it’s just belt austempering) up here in the Detroit area. If you walk into that plant, it’s incredibly clean. You don’t have the oil fumes, vapors, and things like that, which in any plant, if it’s properly vented and so on, isn’t a big deal, but you don’t have that feel to it. There is nothing toxic about it.
But it’s like any other quenchant: If you’re operating oil or salt at 300° or above, you’ve got to take care. Whether it’s oil or salt, they don’t mix well with water because it’s above the boiling point of water, as an example. I’d say in those areas, those two have similar challenges, it’s just a matter of dealing with a hotter quenchant.
The one challenge with salt -- and these are "conventional"/a bit older equipment -- is the carryout. When you carry out salt as molten, when it cools down it solidifies on the surface. Instead of getting a little grease and/or oil on your transfers, you can get solidified salt. It’s not fun or desirable. So, with salt, if you’re in a batch line, for instance, it’s more pronounced and you do have to have some special maintenance procedures to rinse down your transfer car and things like this. As long as you do that, it’s very easy to maintain. The reality is, you’re coming out of a hot quench, and when you get it onto a transfer car to get to a washer, it can solidify. Once you get to the washer, then it’s easy street. In your continuous furnaces, it’s really not an issue because you’re going right from one area right into a washer and it’s much more contained. The reality is your batch systems can get a bit messier. If you’re then taking, say, a hot load that was quenched to a bainitic temperature and putting it into a washer, you could be putting a 600°Fahrenheit load into a washer and you get a lot of steam.
The challenge is, if you don’t contain the steam, the steam can contain salt in the vapor. Just like oil can be in vapor, too, but it’s just a different animal. You don’t want that any more than you want an oil vapor. It can stick on different things. I would say that would be the one reality about salt in batch. The newer systems and things that we focused on is overcoming that. For instance, by quenching in salt (if it’s not batch) moving directly into a multistage washer before that load even comes out onto a transfer so there is no carryout of salt. By the time the parts come out, they’re perfectly clean. The nice thing is, remember, washing salt off of a part with water versus washing oil off with water, another big topic maybe you’ve had some podcasts on is washing oil.
“There is nothing toxic about it.” -Bill Disler Photo Credit: BRRT at Pixabay.com
You know that story of oil and water don’t mix? Well, they don’t. However, salt and water do mix. Salt goes into solution in water, and we carry it away and you’re going to get nice, clean parts. That’s another nice byproduct of a system designed properly. In the older days of those old big pusher furnaces, one of the automotive companies was making transmission gears — those were open salt tanks. So, we’ve come out of a furnace into an open salt tank and then you’d bring it up and take it into the washer and the temper. Along the way, you had all kinds of salt buildup. You must remember, those were about 50 years old. So, the key is designing equipment to manage it differently containing those wash fumes and things like that.
That’s what we see the next evolution of salt quench systems being because we do see salt becoming more common, definitely asked for after the people have had their interests with compressed gas quenching and distortion control. Now that it’s coming back, we really need to think about repackaging it to keep it clean in the plant.
DG: With every system, whatever it is, there is maintenance involved. Are there any special maintenance requirements on a salt quenching system?
BD: Yes. I’d say it’s different than a conventional oil quench system. Any quench system that you’re looking at has its uniqueness to maintenance. Salt can be something that needs to be learned a bit if it’s new to somebody. We talked a little bit about the risk of salt solidifying and creating a mess, so you have to rinse it down. As I said, in a transfer car, in a batch situation, we normally would suggest a parking station where you can rinse that car down very easy. You do have to look for salt buildup on some of the systems. It is not difficult maintenance, but you have to be attentive to it.
The one thing I’ll say is a benefit with oil in some cases, when you have carryout, it gets all over your equipment, it’s a lubricant. It’s messy, it’s undesirable, but it’s a lubricant. . . until a bunch of other stuff gets tied into it and then it can be an abrasive lubricant. Salt doesn’t bring you that benefit. So, you have a little bit more housekeeping. There are a lot of recommendations on how to do that.
Also, generally, for a quench system, we would recommend a holding tank that you can pump out the tank with versus some plants would use a tanker and have a company come in and pump out tanks. The reason for that is, if you had maintenance or if you had a different issue, you want to try to keep that salt liquid. When you’re looking at things, if you were running a heat treat where you really wanted to shut it down for extended periods of time, bring it back up and so on, you had to look closely at salt because salt takes a while to re-liquefy once it solidifies. It’s not the kind of thing you turn on and off like one of the benefits of the gas quench- you can turn it on and off. Again, there is no one size fits all; it’s got a blend of benefits and some challenges, so it just depends on the operation itself.
DG: Is there danger in a salt quench system if power goes out and the salt solidifies? Are you going to ruin your equipment or is it just all froze up and now needs heated back up?
BD: We would recommend pumping it into another tank. But if, in fact, it was to solidify, you just have to take the time to re-melt it when you get power back.
DG: Okay. It’s not like ice, I assume; it doesn’t expand and crack you tank.
BD: No, it’s not going to blow up or anything.
DG: Let’s move into a practical question about applications. I have a two-part question. First, what are some typical applications for salt quenching, and then, secondly, are there products and/or processes that people are doing that they not ought to even think about salt quenching? So, first, what are the good ones, secondly, what are the ones we shouldn’t think about?
BD: Again, I take salt quench applications into two categories. The most common, that we talked about earlier, are bainitic quenches — austempering and things. We even see it now becoming more common- ductal iron austempering which is a slightly different process starting with a different material. The benefit of that, and we’ll see more and more of it, is it’s got a tremendous strength to weight ratio, even better than aluminum, as an example. It’s a great way to lightweight certain things. So, we have the whole world of bainitic quenching, which is pretty traditional with salt, but the less traditional would be the martensitic type quenching, or we’ll say more conventional to most of our people using oil.
One application we’re seeing a lot of activity with is in-gears. The reason for gears being something that people are looking close at because they’re so sensitive to distortion. Even when people went to gas quench, they found that to get quiet transmissions, they still did some light grinding. But, just to be clear, the less distortion you have, the less grinding you do. Grinding isn’t a nice process; you’re grinding away on some hard steel. That is something, especially when we look at electric vehicles coming out, some of those power trains are now spinning at much higher RPMs. Distortion is going to be even more sensitive to them and I suspect that salt could play a role for them, especially in some of the volumes if they don’t want to get into some of the complications and expenses of a gas quench type system.
"Recently, AFC-Holcroft got a patent on a quench severity probe which can measure that in salt. Whereas before there was no way to measure that, we can now, with a probe, see the change in quench severity with this technique within a quench tank so that it’s more repeatable." - Bill Disler, AFC-Holcroft
DG: How about people that shouldn’t even think about salt if you’re doing a certain type of product?
BD: Again, I think part of it is the application itself. Getting into salt, if you’re already in oil, is a commitment. There are a lot of benefits to it. There are going to be some parts where, maybe, you can’t get the heat transfer quenching down to 300°. If you need to be in a cold oil (a lower temperature quench) to get certain characteristics, salt is probably not going to be a great fit for you.
There are interesting things happening now with salt that may be worth mentioning and it’s been going on for a while, but, interestingly, we talk about vapor barriers and all this stuff, there are some people that add small amounts of water to salt. AFC-Holcroft has been doing a lot of research on this because the actual physics of how this works is kind of mystifying.
Even for austempering ductal iron, when you’ve got salt at 600-700°Fahrenheit, there is water often added to the salt to increase its quench severity. The question you obviously ask is, “Well, how the heck do you get water to stay in salt in anything over 212?” It does, in fact, happen. It stays in a liquid form (based on some testing we’ve done), whether it’s a combination of pressure and some other physics going on.
The interesting thing is, when we did testing with the heat transfer rate, it’s not just conventional water blend with salt to give you the heat transfer coefficient change with salt with a little bit of water in it, but it appears that as you do quench and there is water, it’s the latent energy that is needed to transfer the water into gas -- which is a little bit of something we’re trying to work against, right? -- that absorbs a lot more energy out of the material.
We know that water is a very severe quenchant so it can really change the quench severity of salt with small (we’re talking about 1-3%) water in salt. Recently, AFC-Holcroft got a patent on a quench severity probe which can measure that in salt. Whereas before there was no way to measure that, we can now, with a probe, see the change in quench severity with this technique within a quench tank so that it’s more repeatable.
It’s a complicated topic. If people want to follow-up and ask me some questions about it later on, I’m happy to talk about it.
DG: So, you patented this quench severity probe?
BD: Yes, we got a patent.
DG: I see another Heat TreatRadio in your future!
BD: We’ve got a few patents. I don’t talk a lot about them, but we’ve got some interesting things going on. That was one we started working on a couple of years ago because people, for a long time, added water to salt to change the quench severity, but it’s a very difficult thing to measure. Now, being able to look at means to measure in-situ is potentially an important ingredient in the next years for people that start transferring into this as a more viable quench option.
DG: One other question, really quick, and maybe a very brief answer: The parts that come out of a salt quench compared to the parts that come out of a high-pressure gas quench, how about the cosmetics of them?
BD: They’re not going to be as bright and shiny as coming out of a gas quench. I don’t think there’s anything out there right now that’s going to give you the same cosmetics as gas quench. If you have an application where that’s really important, gas quench is hard to beat. I will tell you there are pros and cons to that. First, a vast majority of parts that are gas quenched; gears, as an example, still go through a shot peening process. That’s not for cleanliness, it’s for surface strength.
The other thing is, as we’re working with ALD-Holcroft, a lot of these systems now have to etch the parts coming out of heat treat. The benefit of nice clean parts is they’re nice and clean. The downside when you’re managing a captive or commercial heat treat is you can’t tell a green part from an untreated part. Believe me, there have been some nightmares where that didn’t go well. And they all look the same. Ironically, for all the benefits that that has, it added in our lines in the gas quenching systems, etching the part so that you could tell, but it’s still not a perfect scenario. Again, if you need nice, clean parts, salt is not going to give you bright and shiny.
DG: Last question: If I am a captive heat treater currently using oil, currently using high pressure gas quench, what are the questions I ought to be asking myself about, potentially, transitioning back over to salt? How do I know my process is a good candidate?
BD: That’s a good question. There are ways that we can look at a particular material, type of part, and the big thing, first, is can we get the heat transfer rate to get the hardenability at the temperature that salt is able to quench at. If you vet a part through that process, you could then look at doing some testing with distortion and so on. If you could be a candidate for a hotter oil quench with your part, this is probably quite viable. If you need to get into cold oil with the heat transfer rates there, it’s worth doing some testing only because, again, sometimes you don’t know exactly what the true heat transfer rate you’re getting with oil is because it could be that vapor phase is playing a little bit of a game with you. Even though the textbook transfer rate of salt isn’t quite as good as it would be for an oil quench in that situation, it might bring benefits beyond just those static numbers, so we need to do some testing and things like that.
The big thing I will say is it’s not a plus to salt, but I’m here to be objective. We build all kinds of equipment not just salt quench. The one thing I’d say a captive work commercial needs to look at and it’s also a factor with the design of the equipment: We’ve been in a lot of heat treats, Doug, and I’m sure some of you go in there and you want to make sure you don’t have your leather-soled shoes on because everything has a film of grease on it from the oil.
The one thing that we tell customers is that if you’re going to put in salt, it’s better if you can have it in an area that is separate from your oil quenches. The reason is that, depending on the system, you can still get vapor if you don’t vent, say, a washer really well. You won’t get it off of the quench because it never boils. It’s, generally, the washer. In the older days you’d see steam coming out of a washer that looked like a leaky tea kettle boiling over. Those systems you’ve got to be careful because there is salt residue in that vapor.
Mixing salt residue with oil is not a good combination. The reason is oil will burn, it’s got the carbon in it; salt is an oxidizer. You really don’t want those two mixed because it can burn more aggressively and create more of a danger. One of the hurdles of people looking at salt is that it is not easy to just put in any old heat treat. If you’ve got an oil quench line, sticking a salt line right next to it, we wouldn’t advocate that.
The newer equipment we’re coming out with, we’ve got a new product that’s been developed to address that specifically (to contain any salt vapor), but the risk that people should look at is mixing salt and oil. If either one of them are allowed to go into vapor phase, you don’t want those two vapors condensating together because the salt can be your oxidizer to oil which wants to burn. For safety reasons sake, we would advocate trying to do this in a separate area. This can be a huge hurdle to a lot of people.
Heat Treat Today publisher and Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, sits down with Bill Jones, CEO of the Solar Atmosphere Group of Companies, to launch this new periodic feature called Heat Treat Legends where senior individuals in the North American heat treat market share their expertise and experience with those less senior.
Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
Doug Glenn (DG): Welcome, everyone, to our inaugural episode of Heat TreatLegends. We're going to start with a true heat treat legend, a gentleman by the name of William Jones from Solar Atmospheres and Solar Manufacturing. We're going to talk to him about his life experiences and some of the things that we'd like to get his perspective on. So, Bill, first off, I just wanted to thank you for joining us. I appreciate you joining us for this episode of Heat TreatRadio.
Bill Jones (BJ): Thank you, very much, Doug, I appreciate the opportunity. As you know, I've had a long life, and to be a legend is something I never really expected. Most of us don't.
DG: Let's just talk a brief introduction — who you are, where you are right now, and what your role is in the companies that you own.
BJ: I've been a technocrat all my life. It started when I was very young, when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I've always been very technically oriented and technically driven. As a matter of fact, the various people that I have worked for have always complained about that, and they said, "You know, Bill, you're always interested in technology, and you're not interested in whether you're making or losing money. We don't want to hear about the technology, we want to see what's on the bottom line." That's sort of where I came from.
"I've been a technocrat all my life. It started when I was very young, when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I've always been very technically oriented and technically driven." - William Jones, CEO, Solar Atmospheres Group of Companies
After I graduated from college, I went to work for a small company, and we were involved in electromechanical things. A lot of our work was development work out of the DuPont company from their experimental station in Wilmington, Delaware, which was one of the premiere development centers in the country at the time. I don't think it's that way so much anymore, but, at the time, it really was a pyramid sort of place.
In my early days, I was introduced particularly into dew point analyzers. They had developed, what they called, a trace moisture analyzer which would measure down to about one or two parts per million. It was right out of the development laboratory and our company built it, and my boss, at that time, worked out to have a license to build the instrument. I ended up being the engineer in charge of putting the thing into production.
Like I say, at the time, (and we're talking about in the late 1950s or ‘60s), there was no real continuous recording of moisture or dew point. I'm talking about low, like down around -100 degrees Fahrenheit, a few parts/million. That was, sort of, a breakthrough. It was an interesting instrument. The instrument is still being built. So, I was very instrumental in that instrument.
That was my introduction into the technology, so to speak. Then, I went on and I became involved in optical pyrometers. As a matter of fact, I was going to bring with me, and I didn't, one of the early temperature optical pyrometers which was built by Leeds and Northrup. That was developed in the 1930s and it is still used today. It was the standard in the industry for many, many years. Anyway, that introduced me into the furnace industry, measuring temperatures with that instrument and then with an electronic optical pyrometer that was developed by another company. I learned all the problems with optical pyrometers respect to emissivity and all that sort of thing.
Those were my early years. I went to work, really, then, in about 1963 for Abar; I was the eighth employee with the company. That put me into the furnace business. Now, the Abar furnaces, at that time, were very high tech. They were designed to operate at temperatures of 4000 degrees Fahrenheit and up, above temperatures where you could really use thermocouples. That fit with my optical pyrometer experience; it was one of the reasons I went there. So, we were building these furnaces. We built them for the electronics industry, particularly for sintering of tantalum anodes, and so I had a very wide experience with that particular product. Then, it graduated into, and we got involved in, other technology. Particularly, we got involved with more normal, what I'll call, industrial processing, because this high temperature technology was either solid-state related, like with the tantalum capacitor or, at that time, with the development of the space launching and all that sort of thing.
With the changes in administration, we went away from space technology, to some extent, in the middle 60s, so it meant that we had this furnace technology and we had to put it to use. So then, we looked at industrial processes. We started to look at things like jet engine processing- processing parts for jet engines and all that sort of thing.
Those were my early years to get into this business. I went into the production aspect of the furnaces. And, of significant note, we built a number of furnaces for, what was, the atomic energy people, particularly at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There was a bid that came out for a horizontal vacuum furnace, and it had a one-line drawing of a hot zone with a ring. (I shouldn't say a ring, we made it into a ring.) But it was this line drawing of a round hot zone with this part sitting in the center of it, which I really can't say too much about. But anyway, I didn't design that, but we had a couple of engineers that designed the hot zone
At that time, Abar was owned by a man by the name of Charlie Hill, and he overlooked the whole project. At the end of the day, after the thing was built, (but not turned on), they handed it over to me. I was like the equivalent of chief engineer for the company, so I had the task of starting that furnace up. It was a very interesting experience. It was, for the first time, when I really saw what that ring hot zone could do. I didn't really recognize all its advantages when we first put it online and started to test it, but we realized that we had something different. But, whenever you have something different, you don't always know what to do with it. That's about where we were. In a year or year and a half, we started to see the advantages of that hot zone.
I was instrumental in the development of the gas cooling system. The original system did not have any recirculation abilities, in other words, it would not quench; it was just static cooling. That whole thing of how to do that, I worked on, and after a lot of failures, I might say, we got it to work satisfactorily, and it has grown and grown and grown ever since.
There are other things about the furnace technology that I've had my fingers on and it's been a very pleasant experience, Doug. I could go on for the rest of our time talking about this, but I won't!
DG: That's good, that's good. At least it gives our listeners some sense of your background. And, I might mention Bill, besides being a technocrat, is also an author. He's authored a book called The Golden Nugget which came out in 2017. It goes into a lot of detail, mentioning a lot of the things you've mentioned here, and much, much more. If anybody is interested in getting a copy of that book, we'll put some information up at the end where people can either contact myself or you directly, Bill, and they can get a copy of that book.
BJ: Thanks, Doug, for the plug. Let me say this: Anyone who wants a copy of that book, I will be happy to send it to them at no charge, postage paid.
DG: Very good! You're being much more generous than I was going to be. I was going to say, feel free to call me, I'm going to charge you $50 for this book and you have to pay postage. ~chuckle~
Let's move on. Let me ask you a couple questions because people are going to be interested in knowing some of the life lessons that you've learned and things of that sort. When you look back on your career, which has been a good 50 years, I'm guessing, what would be the top one, two, even three accomplishments? When you're taking that 30,000-foot view and looking back, what do you see as far as major accomplishments?
BJ: The major accomplishment, obviously, is the development of the vacuum furnace, and that particular horizontal ring furnace. We didn't patent it at Abar, unfortunately. We should have, but we didn't know what we had, honestly, and then it got out into the field anyway and we couldn't patent it. Aside from that, that particular approach — that round furnace approach — has been duplicated by all our competitors around the world. That is a major accomplishment and it, really, has my name on it, which nobody will tell you, but that's okay.
DG: That's why we do these interviews. Just so people know, if you look behind you, Bill, on your screen, you've got a round cylinder furnace there. I think that's the type of thing you're talking about, there, with the flat band heating element.
"That was almost unheard of back then. Now it's been adopted all over the place, today. That's some of the major accomplishments."
BJ: Yes, round elements. It's a graphite hot zone which we developed. Our original hot zones at Abar were all metal. They were molybdenum and the elements were molybdenum, and the elements were all riveted together. Now, the advantage of graphite is that you don't have to rivet anything and, actually, part of my development was to be able to design the furnace, the elements anyway, so that they could be bolted together. Originally, the graphite heating elements, particularly the ones that were in the Ipsen furnace, and even predecessors before that, they were all tubular. They were put together not with threads, but they were put together, not like an erector set, but where you have pins and . . .
DG: Yes, couplers of some sort.
BJ: Yes, I'm not thinking of it right. But anyway, they were just pushed together, really, literally. They were troublesome; the joints loosened up. They were difficult. Cheap, yes. The graphite tube was very, very inexpensive. That was done at VFS (Vacuum Furnace Systems) when I established that company. We developed the round, and flat, thin, graphite heating elements which were bolted together with graphite screws and nuts. That was almost unheard of back then. Now it's been adopted all over the place, today. That's some of the major accomplishments.
DG: That is a major one.
BJ: Before you get off this, Doug, I selected the picture, that you noticed, on purpose. To heat treat something of that size and to bring it to full metallurgical properties, which they are (they are actually H-11 or H-13, I'm not sure which), but that's not exactly a forgiving alloy to heat treat and bring to full hardness of that size and weight. That's the advantage of our vacuum gas quenching over pressure. That furnace, or almost any one of ours, if you design it right, will do that job. I can tell you, in my early days getting into the heat-treating business, I tried to do big rolls like that and fell right on my nose.
This work was done out at our Hermitage plant which Bob Hill runs and it's an everyday thing, rolls like this and otherwise. That's why I put it up there.
William Jones, CEO of Solar Atmospheres Group of Companies, shares pinnacle moments from his life and lessons learned along the way.
DG: Right. That Hermitage plant is in western Pennsylvania and, yes, I've been in there and it's a great plant. You've got a lot of furnaces and much bigger furnaces than that, even.
I want to get to the human side of things. You've had a significant impact on a lot of people in the heat treat industry, me being one of them, to be quite frank. But I'm curious: When you were a young man getting involved in the industry, who were a couple of people who had a significant impact on you? Who helped you along?
BJ: I worked for a company up in Attleboro, Massachusetts for two years or so and they had developed a two-color optical pyrometer, and that's why I went to work for them. It had all sorts of problems because of emissivity — that’s a technical thing I don't want to get into — but the two-color pyrometer has not been well accepted because of that stumbling block.
Anyway, the owner of the company was Dr. George Bentley. I was with him for 2 years and I decided I wanted to leave the company. I was a field engineer for them in the mid-Atlantic operating out of Philadelphia. That company is in Boston. George called me on the phone, and he said, "Bill, I'd like to talk to you. I know you're leaving the company, but I want to have a time with you." I said, “ok.” This was back in the day when travel was not particularly great, so it took me most of the day to get up there. The next day I went in to see him about 9 or 9:30 in the morning.
I sat down with George and we both chitchatted for 15 or 20 minutes. The most important thing he said to me, at the end of the conversation, was, "Bill, I want to tell you something. I have observed you over the years and I can tell you, you are never going to be happy until you run and own your own business." I looked at him and that went right over the top of my head. That was never a thought, ever, in my mind. It didn't really have any impact for several years, but later I realized he was right. Until you're sitting in the top chair and until you're making the decisions of winning and losing, you don't know what it's all about. That was a prime moving event.
"[George said,] "Bill, I want to tell you something. I have observed you over the years and I can tell you, you are never going to be happy until you run and own your own business." I looked at him and that went right over the top of my head. That was never a thought, ever, in my mind. It didn't really have any impact for several years, but later I realized he was right." - William Jones, CEO, Solar Atmosphere Group of Companies
There were two people that were quite influential, and in a negative way: One was George Bodine from Lindberg, and the other was Sam Whalen from Aerobraze. Back towards the end of my Abar career, I had decided I wanted to go into the heat-treating business here in Philadelphia. My wife, Myrt, and I, independently, met with each one of them and their wives and we had dinner. And they said, "Ugh, Bill, you do not want to go into the Philadelphia area in the heat-treating business. It will never be successful." They both poured ice water down my back about going to business in the greater Philadelphia area in the heat-treating business. I cataloged that and, later, did it anyway. In a negative way, those two were very influential.
There were a lot of other people, too. Abe Willan at Pratt & Whitney. I had some people at General Electric that were very influential. There is a whole litany of people that I could thank for what they've done in my life and for what they've added to my career.
DG: Let's advance on here to the next question. I think this is always interesting to find out from somebody: One of those things if you knew at the beginning of your career, something you know now, what would it have been? Given your experience, what are the top two or three lessons that you've learned during your career that you think have been most helpful to you.
BJ: There are a lot of lessons learned. We, as practical people in the heat treat industry, tend to pooh-pooh education, not always, of course; I have metallurgists and PhD's working for us in the company. Anyway, my point is, those of us who are practical engineers and others who have come up through the ranks, like my son Roger and others, we tend to look at the practical aspects of heat treating.
What is the lesson learned from that? Well, education is really part of it. The basis of what we do comes from the field of chemistry. Metallurgy grew out of chemistry. If you don't have a decent educational background, then you don't know the basis of where we came from because that's the basis of where we're going. What I'm trying to say is: What is the lesson learned? The lesson learned is don't reinvent the wheel because the wheel does not have to be reinvented.
I think those of us in our younger years tend not to look over things like that. We tend to say, "Well, we're going to develop this and we're going to do it" come hell or high water and we end up falling on our nose. That's the point: take the time and effort to study what's been done and then go from there.
I would say, also, the other thing is to listen to what people in the field want and what their comments are about what you're trying to do. I think that's the most important lesson to share.
DG: Listen and learn, learn, and listen. Those are good, Bill. I appreciate that.
Are there any disciplines that you've developed, your work disciplines, your workday, or your work week? Are there any disciplines that you've developed over the years that have been helpful?
BJ: As I said, part of your discipline is your educational background. I don't want to emphasize that too much, but that's an important base to start from. My life has been a very workaday place. I have put all kinds of hours into my career and my work. I didn't do it to make money: I did it because, as I said in my early comments, I'm a technocrat. If I see something that needs to be developed, I work on it and I get to it.
I think work ethic, in our business, is very important. People who are successful, certainly in the heat-treating business and in almost any engineering discipline, have to put work into what they're doing. I'm talking about more than 40 hours a week; you're going to work 40-60 hours a week in order to accomplish. I know, Doug, you're doing that in what you do because I see the development of your magazine and all the things that you do; you're putting endless hours into the development of that thing.
The development of a business is like pushing a big cart up a hill. You're going to push, push, push, and get that cart up onto the top of the hill and you never stop pushing. You get to the top of the hill, and you think you're just going to relax and go from there, but you can't. There is always another mountain.
DG: Yes, another hill or portion of the hill. Let me ask you this, because it addresses the next question I wanted to ask you, and that was about work life balance. Have you had to struggle with that and how have you dealt with it?
BJ: Well, that's a very interesting comment. If my wife were here, she would tell you that I've dedicated my life to my work and I've abandoned her. That's not really quite true, except. . . . My wife, Myrt, and I have been married for more than 60 years and she is a wonderful helpmate. She has run the household since our early marriage and raised our children. I did too, but she was principal. The mother is the core of the family; the father is just a procreator, I guess. Getting your life in balance with work is always a challenge. I have been involved in church things for many years and one of our pastors once came to me with something he wanted me to do. His name was John Clark, and I said, "John, don't you realize how busy I am? To take this on is more than I really want to do." And he said to me, "Bill, don't you know, if you want something done, you go to a busy person?" So, I did it.
DG: I've got a two-part question for you, now. I'm sure over your career, you've had many ups and many downs. I want to start with one of the downs. What was one of the most difficult, trying times of your career? Then, after that, I want to know what was a highlight? What do you think was one of the pinnacles of your career?
"There is nothing that beats hard work and dedication . . . ." - William Jones
BJ: I would have to say the most trying time in my career is that I've been involved in three lawsuits. If you get involved with lawyers and with the court, believe me, that is a trial. I was successful in each one of these and not being litigated to the point where I had to either pay or go to jail or what have you. But when you get involved with the law and with attorneys, number one, it becomes expensive, and number two, you're going to have a lot of sleepless nights over it. That's just bad.
Now, I have learned to avoid that, at all costs, if I can. Look, when you're in the business world, there are going to be challenging things — something doesn't work or whatever, and somebody is going to come back at you if they can. We live in a very litigious world, that's the problem.
People don't always live up to their obligations. I've learned it's best to do that. I'll give you an example: Just within the last two years, this was not a legal problem, but we had a furnace that was in the field. It had a deficiency in the furnace, and it was not easy to fix. So, I made the decision to completely bring that furnace back here to our main plant and to give the customer a brand-new furnace. By the way, we're talking about something that is $600,000. It's better to do that than it is to suffer the consequences.
Now, we brought that furnace back and I, personally, went over that with a fine-tooth comb to find out what in the world was wrong with it. We located the problems (it was in the chamber) and I had the chamber remachined on the front flange and that meant tearing the whole furnace apart and putting it back together again. It was only 2 years old. We completely fixed the problem, put it back online and then we resold it. We, obviously, lost money in the whole process, but our customer ended up happy with a new furnace, we satisfied him, and we went on from there. There is just a highlight of some of the issues that you can get into.
There are personal issues that sometimes hurt, but there is also a lot of gratification, too. A lot of people have appreciated the things that we've done, and I've appreciated more what they've done!
DG: Right: lawsuits and things of that sort are, obviously, kind of the low point. Can you nail down one, when you look back? What was the most enjoyable highlight of your career so far?
BJ: When I tested that first round hot zone, I did it by myself at night in a plant where I was the only one there. We had a big sight glass in the front of the furnace, and I could see the entire hot zone, the heating element, the heat shield, the ring and so forth, and I was able to measure the temperature and it was a WOW. This thing works! That was a highlight.
DG: If I had answered this question for you, I would have thought you would have said something like starting your company and building two furnace manufacturing companies. You've got four successful commercial heat treat companies, as well. I would have thought that a lot of the accomplishments along those lines would have been highlights for you.
BJ: You're right. And, along those lines, the car bottom furnaces that we've built, particularly the ones that are at Hermitage in western Pennsylvania, are a highlight. The very first one is a chapter on how that furnace came to be.
Anyway, it was designed and built by a group of engineers. I was on top of that. We met weekly during the design phase. We didn't put it together completely here at Souderton, we put it together to know that it was vacuum tight and so forth, then we took the furnace all apart, shipped it to Hermitage, put it all back together again and we ran test cycles on that furnace, empty. It did everything that we wanted it to empty, but that's not putting a workload in it.
One of the reasons for building that furnace was to process these big titanium coils that were very heavy. So, we put six of them into the furnace. I said, "I want to process six of these coils," and we had like a 20-25 thousand-pound workload of titanium in the furnace worth a lot of money, we're talking about probably a million dollars of work in the furnace. At the time, Bob Hill said, "Bill, you're not going to run the final product first. I think we should make a run with just some scrap steel that we have around." I said, "No, Bob. I am thoroughly convinced this furnace is going to work and work right. Let's put the coils in there and run it." And we did. You know what? It was 100% right. It worked. It was a big success. There have been other things, too, but that was one of the highlights.
DG: Let me ask a couple final questions. Based on what you're seeing going on today in the world, in the industry, wherever you want to take this one, Bill, is there any advice or wisdom that you'd give to today's up-and-coming heat treat industry people?
"I think, from my prior comments you'll get this. There is nothing that beats hard work and dedication to what you're trying to do." - William Jones, CEO, Solar Atmospheres Group of Companies
BJ: Yes, I would say this and I think, from my prior comments, you'll get this: There is nothing that beats hard work and dedication to what you're trying to do. So, what would I say to a young person, let's say, somebody that is in college, and they want to think about their career?
First, you want to do something that you're happy doing. You don't want to work at something that you're unhappy at. If you're unhappy, get out of it and do something else. You want to be happy at your job. That's number one.
Then, you must be properly prepared for it. You must have enough education to go forward. If you're going to be a writer or something involved in marketing, you must have some experience and training in that field. I have a marketing person sitting in the room with me, so I have to say that. She's a young person, so I can talk to her. That's the kind of advice I would give to a young person. You want to be dedicated, you want to be happy, and you want to work at it. You have to work at it. You're not going to have it handed to you. At least here, in our economy, in the United States, which we have a wonderful opportunity, the only opportunity in the world is, really, here in the United States.
DG: Last question. This is a question that I'm curious about. The group of companies that you've established — Solar Manufacturing, Magnetic Specialties, all the Solar Atmosphere companies — are all US-based, family-owned and a single business, separate entities but all owned by you and Myrt.
BJ: That's right. I can tell you that 100% of our companies are owned by Myrt and I. We have no other shareholders or stockholders. Originally, at VFS, I did. That long story is in my book, but no, today, 100% Myrt and I own the businesses.
Of course, this is a two-edged sword. If all these businesses were up and running and they are all successful, like they are today, and if I were 40 years old, I would have another, possibly, 40 years to look forward to and to operate these businesses. Now, at my age, I'm over 80 years old, so how many years do I have ahead of me? You can count them on one hand if that. We don't know.
DG: I was going to say, let's not put a limit on that, the Lord knows.
BJ: That's right, exactly. That's exactly what I was going to say. You and I understand that all too well. It's all in the Lord's hands. Myrt and I both feel that we've got a few years ahead of us, but we just don't know. Someone else commented to me, they said, "Well, your other competitors, and so forth, have been bought and sold by other businesses and you have not." I've looked at these companies that have been bought. Somebody made some money when they were sold, but I can tell you the employees certainly didn't make out on that. Any employee that's involved, particularly if you're at the higher end of the company, your life is in jeopardy because you don't know what the new owners are going to do. Half the time, within two years, you're going to be out on the street and all the hard work that you've put into the company is going to go down the drain.
DG: Right. This is getting to the core of the question that I wanted to ask, and that was that you've got successful companies going on, their family owned, they're going into a third generation of Jones, who is going to be helping to run the business and things of that sort. So many of your competitors, whether they be furnace manufacturers or actual commercial heat treaters, have either been sold, consolidated into bigger companies or, on the furnace side of things, many of them are now owned by international companies, companies outside of the United States.
My question to you, specifically, is why do you think it is that Solar has been one of the few companies that has been successful in maintaining a privately-owned, family-owned business where others haven't?
Jamie Jones is president of Solar Atmospheres in Souderton.
Trevor Jones is the CEO of Solar Manufacturing and Magnetic Specialties
BJ: We are a family-owned company and the fact that we have not been bought or sold, (and we’ve had the opportunity, but I didn't want any part of it), what's the bottom line? Why? Well, it's very simple: Money is not a driving factor in my life or in my wife's life. Money is not it. You know, the old saying is, when you go to the grave, there's not going to be a U-Haul behind you. You're going there with what you came with, which is nothing. My father once said, "Money doesn't really mean anything except that you can live a little more comfortably," and he was right about that. But, at this point in our lives, my wife and I are comfortable enough, and we certainly don't need to add on and on and on to our personal wealth.
I guess, to put it in simple terms, there is no reason for us to sell the company. If we can turn it over to our operating people who now are running it, and if they can do it successfully, God bless them, and what I and my wife, Myrt, have started can continue. And, you're right – in the room with me is Trevor, my grandson, and he is the third generation. Behind him is another Jones, his name is Cole, who is now 14 years old. He's not working for the company; I don't know what he's going to do. Trevor worked in this company since he was 16 years old, maybe a little bit earlier. He's saying, “Yes, I think you're right” His whole life, like mine, has been dedicated to this business. I don't know if that answers your question.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jamie Jones, a grandson of Bill Jones, brother of Trevor Jones, and the father of Cole Jones, is also one of the key third generation leaders. Jamie is president of Solar Atmospheres in Souderton and Trevor leads Solar Manufacturing in Sellersville.
DG: Yes, I think it does. I think your quick answer- you're not a money driven person says a lot.
Well, Bill, that's it. I really appreciate the time you've taken to spend with us. I want to encourage people in the industry to make sure that they pick up a copy of your book, The Golden Nugget - An Entrepreneur Speaks, by William Jones and Heather Idell. It's worth reading. Bill, thank you very much. I really appreciate the time you spent with us, today, and congratulations on being a heat treat legend.
BJ: Thank you very much. The Lord's blessed us in that respect, Doug, and you.
DG: Yes. Thank you very much.
BJ: You're welcome. Bye-bye.
Doug Glenn
Publisher Heat TreatToday
To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.
Heat TreatRadiohost Doug Glenn has a timely discussion with Josh Hale of International Search Partners, North America’s only heat treat specific headhunter organization, about the exceptionally tight labor market and what captive and commercial heat treat shops can do to gain and maintain the valuable workers they’re in need of.
Below, you can either listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or you can read an edited transcript.
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
One of the canine "workers" at International Search Partners
Doug Glenn (DG): I don't think that we've had a non-technical issue that is as important as this one, and that is the labor shortage that is real and that most people believe is going to get only worse over the next several years. Here to discuss that with us is Josh Hale who is with International Search Partners. Josh, first off, welcome to Heat TreatRadio. If you don't mind, if you would give our listeners just a brief background about you, where you come from, and your role in helping people fill roles in the heat treat industry.
Josh Hale (JH): Yes, for sure. Thanks for having me, Doug. I've been recruiting since about 2004, and when I say recruiting, I mean helping different companies identify, hire and engage, and eventually bring on board employees at all various types of levels. We are International Search Partners. We are actually founded in 1998, so for over 20 years we've been working pretty exclusively in the heat treat space. I always kind of say we do about half our business with furnace and other manufacturers, about half with commercial heat treaters and then a mix of stuff tangential to the industry, whether that be forging companies or other kind of industrial manufacturing. Again, I've been recruiting in personnel, hiring, and job market space for a long time. I came and joined ISP and acquired the company about six or seven years ago now. ISP has a long history in heat treat, I've got a lot of history in recruiting, and here we are.
DG: You're in the right business at the right time, I can tell you, because it seems very interesting out there. I was looking at your website and I've got to deviate a little bit. So, it's not just you – apparently you've got at least one other person and two canines that are helpful to you, yes?
JH: Haha, yes! In fact, one of the canines is here in the room. If the computer wasn't mounted up I could show him off.
DG: So, you've got Jessica Maier as one of your helpers? A partner?
Jessica Maier Senior Recruiter International Search Partners
JH: Yes, exactly. Jessica works with us. She's based out of San Diego. I'm based out of Austin Texas. We both work remote, working from home. I've got the weekend vibes with the Hawaiian shirt today. I don't need to go into the office or anything. But yes, we work very consistently and tightly together. Then, there is Jim McNeal, who actually founded our company in 1998. We jokingly call him "President Emeritus," but with that emeritus status, he works with us on a few select clients here and there. Then, we've got a rotating group of consultants that we bring on board on more of an ad hoc basis, so we're prepared and able to scale, as necessary, for hot markets like this. But, the core is me and Jessica, and for smaller industries like heat treat, that works pretty well.
I would be remiss not to mention that we also have a new junior recruiter- Jessica just recently had a baby, so 2-month old Lincoln is practicing to be able to pick up the phone here pretty soon to help us out too.
DG: Well, at the time of this recording, since we're talking about babies, one of our staff members is actually in the hospital delivering.
JH: In about 25 years we'll be celebrating the new 40 Under 40 class between them.
DG: Right, exactly. And, you know, I should mention that Josh was a member of our 40 Under 40 Class in 2019.
Let's talk about this: Based on your business, you, probably more than anybody in the heat treat industry, have a good 30,000 foot view of the labor situation. Is it severe? How severe is it and what can we say about that at this point?
JH: I haven't seen anything like this in all my years of recruiting, in or outside of heat treat. I think it's affecting a lot of industries. Most of the data points I would reference on this are a little more empirical, but for example, I was in St. Louis for the ASM Heat Treat show a couple weeks ago. I was just kind of making my rounds and saying “hi” to people as I like to go to these shows to put a face behind a name with people I typically spend time on the phone with or emailing, and everybody was telling me, "Hey, we need help. Please help me find a candidate. We need candidates. Please send us resumes." That was the consistent theme. So, there is an empirical data point.
We tend to keep track of our open searches in a fluid way, if you will. Without getting into the weeds too much, what I mean by that is that we've got clients that come to us with, "Hey, we've got an empty seat, we need to fill it. Go out there and find somebody." We've got clients who come and retain our services for really urgent searches, but we actually do quite a lot of business in, what I call, “keeping our eyes open.” Like, you don't necessarily have an opening but you like to see a good talent when you come across it. Since I specialize in the industry, I can keep you in mind. We do a lot of work that way too which is less of an open position and more of a “keep your eyes open” situation.
With that, it's how we work. Typically, we may have anywhere between 20-30 real open positions and then maybe 50% more on this “keep your eyes open” thing. Right now, I have probably 50-55 actual open positions. This is twice as much as normal. Honestly, in this type of market, this is with me not doing any kind of real outbound efforts to generate new positions because I have too much to work on. Again, it's kind of empirical- it's not real data driven, but from my experience, I've never seen it like this.
DG: So, in essence, it is real; I don't think we have to convince anyone of that. From your perspective, it's pretty nearly doubled the number of open positions that you're actively looking for, and I'm sure there would be a lot of other people in that other category you mentioned about- if you find somebody, let me know.
JH: And, certainly, there is an opportunity for a lot more open positions if I were to chase after it. I'm just in a situation where there is so much business right now for existing clients that getting a new client would be difficult.
DG: Well, after this airs, you might have to hire a third and fourth partner to get things going, because, I can tell you, there's a lot of people looking.
Just anecdotally from our side, myself and my wife just got back from attending the Metal Treating Institute fall meeting this year down in your neck of the woods, down in San Antonio. To a man, to a company, to a person, everybody was looking for people to work. It could be in key, higher level management areas as well as shop floor- I need a guy that knows how to load a furnace.
In your company, specifically, very briefly: Are you guys dealing with furnace operator type people or do you tend to deal with more of the engineer/management type folks?
JH: More of the engineer/management type folks is where we really specialize. We placed a furnace operator or two in the last couple of years, but it's very rare for us. But, from talking to customers/clients/people, those hourly production type positions are definitely a situation where companies are struggling. It's kind of a long way to answer your question but historically we haven't really done a lot of work in that space because at that hourly production level you can hire somebody off the street and train them. You're not going to necessarily pay my fee to go out there and find that type of person, while in this market, more and more companies are telling me they're willing to pay a fee if we can find somebody, so it's coming up more and more.
DG: And that is the operative word – if you can find someone, which is not easy. Obviously, a lot of those jobs tend to be more regional – you can hire people locally, but it is difficult.
I want to delve into causation a bit. We know we've got a very, very tight labor market, and there are a lot of theories around about why that is. I'm curious, from your perspective, Josh, what's causing it? What's the issue here?
JH: There is a lot of theorization out there. I could spend hours going down the rabbit hole. There are some really interesting theories. In fact, did you listen to the guy speak the keynote at MTI? He talked a little bit about this idea of men not coming back to the workforce. I've listened to some of his talks and one thing that he mentions that I really buy into is this idea that the boomer generation had dual incomes, they were working and they really generated a lot of wealth and that wealth now about to get inherited by younger generations. These younger generations see that and aren't necessarily motivated to work as much.
People are moving towards the “YOLO Economy”
This is the kind of theory that I would buy into because one of the other aspects that I'm seeing a lot of in the market (and I've heard people pine on in some of the editorials out there) is this idea they call the "YOLO Economy." The YOLO Economy is, basically, the idea that you only live once. Now people are coming at this, especially coming out of COVID, like, "I don't want to go back to that job. I want to try to get the band back together. I want to go write a novel. I want to do crafts and they start a little Etsy business and sell those on-line. I can travel more." They maybe want to work part-time and travel, especially if they've got some foundation from an inheritance, I see that as a real factor here.
For someone like me, a hardworking, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy, this is so hard to put my mindset around, but I hear it come up a lot. It's like, "Hey, I'm done going into the office 40 hours a week."
DG: Very, very interesting. First off, YOLO is great; I hadn't heard that before, so that's helpful. But, you know, it is interesting the change in psychology, if you will. It's something only a first world nation, first world economy, which is a lot of the western hemisphere is these days, where there is enough wealth out there that they don't really need to worry about working. I'm a boomer, right? I'm on the tail end of the boomers, so yes, double income or whatever, the kids wouldn't necessarily need to worry about working and, if you don't need to work, you don't. That is the nature of man.
JH: Another factor that I think has come into play here, speaking of not working (especially COVID affected this): people are retiring earlier. If you were going to retire in three or four years and then COVID hits, "I might as well do it now," that kind of thing is coming up. That affects heat treat, especially, as it's kind of an older industry in terms of the core workforce. We're seeing a lot of that too. So, people retiring, people not wanting to go back to work- all those factors definitely affect it. There is a confluence of things. Like I said, we could go hours going down this rabbit hole – it's really interesting.
DG: Even things as political as immigration policy are certainly having an effect on the labor market.
Let's move on to this: What kind of advice would you give, Josh, to companies nowadays who are looking to fill a position, which is, essentially, as we said, pretty much everybody? From your perspective, what are some of the fundamentals they ought to be thinking about?
JH: The analogy I like to use, when people talk about recruiting or hiring, is the sports team: If you were trying to build out the world's greatest basketball team – just like you're trying to build out the world's greatest heat treat or the world's greatest furnace OEM – if you're going to try to do that, you want the best people to try out for your team.
If you take this analogy down further, when you're trying to build the world's best basketball team, you're not going to hope that LeBron James applies to join your team. You're going to go out there and tap him on the shoulder and say, "Hey, my team's really good. Come and join us. We're a championship squad." You need to take that proactive recruiting approach. That's part of the services that obviously our company offers; we specialize in this, we're in this day in and day out, and we're building up this bench of people to go out there and proactively recruit, again, not coming in and applying to a job.
But you can do that if you have your own company too. I would advise anybody who owns a business or is managing a business to have a good pipeline of people at the ready all the time. It's easy to get comfortable – I've got my team, I've got my department set up. It's not going to be like that a lot. Somebody like me might go in there and pull somebody away.
"The 'LeBron James' style of recruiting is proactive and necessary."-Josh Hale
DG: You're not doing yourself any favors with that, Josh.
JH: Well, you know, if it happens, I always tell people, you can either be a client or you can be a source, one or the other. But yes, somebody might retire, somebody might take that YOLO philosophy and leave. So, you should always have that bench going, always continually be networking. I tell people, too, you don't want to be afraid to “top-grade”: If you do have the opportunity to bring somebody in who's maybe better than the existing person, that can help you and your team and can build up the morale and the overall core a little bit better.
DG: What do you mean by that? Are you suggesting you replace a person with whom you are currently happy with somebody who’s better, or just hire them in addition to that person?
JH: If you can hire in addition to is the best solution because it widens your bench a little bit, to use the sports team analogy, if you can replace your starter, put your starter on the bench, and have a great guy who can come in and pinch hit or whatever, that helps a lot.
So just have that kind of philosophy. It's kind of a forward thinking philosophy, it's a proactive-type philosophy. I think that's the biggest thing. You can't wait until someone gives notice and leaves, now you've got an empty seat and now you’re struggling and your hair is on fire. You really need to do this constantly. That's my biggest piece of advice.
The other bullet point that comes up when I think about this, (and there are people out there that don't want to hear it), but you really need to kind of loosen your requirements a little bit. People come to me saying, "Hey, I've got an opening. We need to have XYZ on the resume and everything else." And I say, "Look, that person you're looking for just doesn't exist." You've got to be a little more realistic in your requirements and hopefully that will help attract the right people.
DG: Once they've got that person in house, one of the other big concerns here is they can gain the right people, but how do you maintain them? What type of advice would you give companies for keeping good workers?
JH: Again, it goes back to the idea of trying to be a little more forward thinking. I think COVID shifted a lot of things. I've seen a lot of stats. More and more people are allowing people to work from home. That's not always possible in the heat treat or commercial manufacturing type environment, but if it is possible to spend a day at home doing some CAD drawings, let them do that. That engages them more and makes them feel more at home.
Being creative with some of the compensation. More and more companies are paying more and more. I think wages are going to generally increase. But, at the end of the day, the market is the market, so I don't expect anybody to overpay just to hire somebody. There are other creative ways of compensation. Vacation is a big one, some work-life balance. . . There are types of benefits. Those kinds of things go a long way.
Offer autonomy, purpose, and mastery in your workplace to maintain workers.
And then, too, trying to have good morale. Morale is kind of a cliche word, but I think it carries a lot of weight. It gives you a reputation in the market as a place that you want to work for. I've heard it said that people like to work for, basically, three things: autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Get somebody in there and give them those things. Give them some opportunity to work and 'do their thing' with that autonomous nature, not being micromanaged. Give them some ability to be trained to grow and develop to create that mastery. And, if you can get them on there for a bigger purpose, that really helps a lot too. People don't want to be just a cog in the system. If they know they're contributing to, whatever it is, growth or more market share or new R&D development, these kinds of things. If they're contributing to something bigger, that's going to keep them on board and it's going to keep them passionate about it and it's going to probably help them maybe think they want to bring their friends into the fold. That's another great way to hire- the internal referral program.
DG: Have you seen, over the time you've been doing this, the motivation for people who want to work change? I know the guys you were talking about, the fellow who gave the presentation at the most recent MTI meeting, they talked about the differences in the generations- the boomers, the X, the Y, the millennials, whatever. Have you seen tangible evidence of a shift in the motivation of what really does engage the different age groups?
JH: I'm going to answer that a couple different ways. At the end of the day, nobody is working for free. Salary is a consistent hot bun for anybody looking to make a move. But I have seen, and a lot of people tell me, that one of their reasons they are looking to leave their company is stagnation. So, I talk about that kind of overall purpose. A lot of people I talk to are saying, "The company I'm with has been doing the same thing in the same way for 50 years and I'm interested in making some upgrades." I can't tell you how many times I've placed a candidate. I ask everybody I work with, "Why are looking to make a move? Why would you consider leaving your current company?" One of the consistent answers I get is, "Well, you know, I made a suggestion for an improvement and my boss told me that we're not going to do that. I know it's going to make an impact and they're not letting me." Having that, again, forward thinking, engaged employees, try their ideas out, be willing to invest in new technology. If you've still got microfiche in your company, you're doing something wrong.
DG: For those of you who don't know what that is, you better Google that one: microfiche.
JH: But I am serious. Move on to the touchscreen computers or the iPads. People are still doing stuff in triplicate in field service reports and things like this. People want to work for technologically advanced company that they can feel good about.
People want to work for technologically advanced companies that they can feel good about.
DG: I'm going to see if you know this one: I was telling somebody the other day, I said, "I still remember when I was in school using a mimeograph machine." I don't know if you know what that one is.
JH: I don't think I've heard of that!
DG: That was the way before Xerox machines. When you did hard copies, you put this thing on a drum and you basically turn it and it would crank out copies in blue. Anyhow, it's an old time one.
Let's move from the company’s perspective of advice to help a company who's looking to hire someone to just talking to the individual who might be in a position that you just talked about or maybe some other motivation like, "You know what? It's time for me to move." They need to make a move for whatever the reason might be. Is there any advice you can give those people for entering a labor market? Obviously, it's a job seeker's market, right?
JH: I'd say a couple things: One, my first piece of advice is, as you said, it is a job seeker's market. But it's now. This is not a job seeker's market forever.
Strike while the iron is hot. If you have any potential idea or any inkling that maybe there is something better out there for you, I'm of the opinion, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I use the idea of big mistake, small mistake. It would be a big mistake to pass on the opportunity to land your dream job, but the small mistake to spend 30 minutes on a phone interview with a company. I would encourage somebody to talk to anybody, to put those feelers out there, have those initial phone interviews.
Now, when you get down the process of an interview, if you decide you don't want to work for the company, you don't want to waste people's time, but for an initial phone interview, sending a resume off, it is truly nothing ventured, nothing gained. It's a big mistake to miss an opportunity but a little mistake to not even try. I would definitely encourage that.
Also, if people are really looking out for their career, if at all possible, opening up the geography helps a lot. I know for some people that's just not possible, but if you could be just a little bit more bold in looking at some potential different regions/areas, that definitely opens up the door for a lot more potential.
People ask for my advice that are looking for the next step. People have in their mind this idea that their career progression is going to be on a linear upgrade. I tell people it's not always going to be like that. If you think of it more like a step up, across, up, across – with that visual – I think it sometimes helps people. What you're going to want to do is leverage your current skills to get to that next company that can then catapult you up a bit. But it's not necessarily going to be going from engineer to engineering manager; it might be going from engineer to senior engineer with opportunity to move to engineering manager.
Be realistic in some of those expectations and not being afraid to utilize your skill set and leverage that to a new company. I hear a lot of times people saying, "Well, I've been an engineer for 10 years. I'm kind of bored with it. I don't want to do CAD drawings anymore." And I say, "But you're really good at that and that's in demand right now. Maybe get with a company where you can do 80% CAD instead of 100% CAD and spend 20% of your time on projects you like." You kind of step up instead of just going linear with the growth.
DG: What do you say to those people, (some might call them naysayers, others might call them very pragmatic people), who say, "Well the grass is always greener." What do you say to those folks who are kind of discouraging employees from looking at something else because, "You're going to go over to that company and it's not going to be what you thought it was.”
JH: There is certainly some validity to that. But, also, like I said, it's kind of a nothing ventured, nothing gained situation. I think that people who have really successful careers are bold, and they take some of these risks. Also, you've got to look at it on a case by case basis. There has been many a time when I've talked to somebody who's had a jumpy work history and maybe has had that "grass is greener" mentality a little too often. I've told them, "Look, you should probably get a couple years under your belt before you talk to me."
Find the happy medium between being too jumpy and being too stable in your career.
There are cases where that makes sense, but I think especially in heat treat, I've seen a lot of people that have been stable, they stay at their company a long time. If you've been with your company, especially going on the 10 year mark, it's kind of time to think about it. I'd say between 7-12 years, you've got to start thinking, "Are you going to retire at the company you are at now or are you going to start to make a move?" There is the opposite of being too jumpy and that's being too stable. Sometimes people look at someone like, "You've been with only one company for 30 years? You're not going to learn our ways."
There is kind of a happy medium there. Like I said, I'd tell people, look, be bold. Don't be afraid to take risks. This is a good market, and your skills are in demand. If you land with the wrong company, you'll find something else. It's not that big of a risk. But, when you're going through the interview process, ask a lot of questions. The candidate is interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing the candidate.
DG: It's a scary thing to change jobs. I've heard statistics say that the one thing that frightens people more than public speaking is losing their job.
Now you mentioned, one of your first pieces of advice for potential job seekers was strike while the iron is hot. This is the time. You mentioned it's not going to last forever. How long do you think this tight labor market is going to be around? What's you prognostication here?
JH: For my business, I hope forever. But, seriously, I don't think so. These things are cyclical. I would say that we've probably got at least another 2-3 years that it's going to be like this. And then we'll probably see the broader economy start to shift at that time. I think, too, it's going to depend a little bit on how our industry is affected, specifically. There are some political implications. I think COVID helped quite a bit in bringing some of the manufacturing on shore, which I've read about in Heat TreatToday a couple of times. There are some things in our industry that might make it even tighter for longer.
I think, too, and maybe you have some comments on this, Doug, from the MTI meeting [in October 2021], but there seems to be a little bit of resistance in heat treat to get with some technology that can bring in some robotics and things of this nature, that would probably help with the labor market, but I think in our industry and specifics, it doesn't go that way as fast as some other industries.
DG: I think that's true. I was listening to those conversations when they were talking about the introduction of robotics. To me, my initial thought was, "Well that's easy. Robotics are easy if you've got high volume, low variable production." In other words, you're running a lot of the same part. Especially with commercial heat treating, which is not necessarily a large portion of the audience that we have, a lot of what we have are the captive heat treater, but, especially in the commercial heat treat world, you're dealing with basically a job shop which is very hard to automate.
But, with our more typical listener/reader with the captive heat treat shops, there is the opportunity for that and those things could, definitely, make a difference in the labor market. Yes, it's important. I think those people will move in that direction. I think we all will, the more comfortable we become with automation and artificial intelligence and things like that, the more we'll move in that direction.
Strike while the iron is hot.
This has been good. Is there anything else? I always like to ask the question just in case there is anything that has popped to your mind that you think would be helpful to our listeners. Anything else you would want to add?
JH: It's a really interesting time right now. I don't know that I'd add anything than what we've talked about. There is a lot of speculation out there. There are a lot of interesting analyses about what's happening. Like I said, it could be a rabbit hole we spend a lot of time going down. But, for sure, if there is anybody thinking there is even a potential opportunity, I'd strike now while the iron's hot. And, for companies looking to hire, I would get creative and try to be proactive and reach out to people and try to have that bench of candidates and try to think about how you can loosen your requirements, whether it be in-house training or maybe have somebody who hits 8 out or 10 bullet points you want instead of 10 out 10, that helps a lot.
Heat Treat Radio host and Heat Treat Today publisher, Doug Glenn, talks with Matt Wright, the chief marketing officer at C3 Data, to hear how the company has reimagined furnace compliance to fit in your pocket.
DG: I want to jump back onto the labs you were talking about. Very briefly, how many where are they?
DG: I also wanted to ask you, because you mentioned about Cloud-based and mobile apps and things of that sort — let’s talk about security for just a second. I just got done doing an interview with a guy by the name of Mark Mills that hasn’t been released yet. He’s a fascinating guy and I’m going to give that one a plug right here- you need to listen to that when it comes out. But he was talking about cybersecurity- he wrote a book called The Cloud Revolution. I’ve also heard at some of the industry meetings that there have been real concerns where some of the larger companies are not wanting their data to go “outside,” if you will- they don’t want to break the ceiling and get into the Cloud, they want it on site. Are you guys seeing much of that? If so, how are you handling that?
MW: Yes, absolutely. Now the tenth of a degree thing, I believe, is going to be extended for another year so that users are going to have one more year for that. The date we’re hearing and looking at is the end of June, so I think June 29th, which I think is the two-year anniversary of Rev E to F, so it will be coming out then, if nothing else changes.
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DG: I should congratulate you on that degree, by the way. I know a year or so ago, you were still working on that, so that’s great!
The second, of course, is establishing, as you pointed out, The Heat Treat Doctor® brand. I’ll talk a little bit more on that later, perhaps.
DG: Dan, any idea why they call it “calcining?” I’ve always wondered this.
