A woman-owned metal stamping company with heat treating capabilities serving a broad range of industries, including automotive, aerospace, energy, medical and general manufacturing, has recently launched as a new entity following a limited asset purchase of a 50-year-old manufacturing company in Downers Grove, Illinois.
Cheryl Wellman, company owner and president, Integrity Manufacturing Inc.
Integrity Manufacturing Inc., which also provides a job shop and assembly work for multiple industries obtained a great limited asset/limited liability agreement with Lindy Manufacturing. Integrity opens its doors with an established customer base and expanded services, two additional plants in Chicago and one in Los Angeles.
"The trend of women in manufacturing is growing, and it reflects on the fact that women are at the forefront of how the market is changing," said Cheryl Wellman, company owner and president, originally a key player at Lindy Manufacturing. "Manufacturers are more than providers of goods: we also advise and support our customers, and that allows for long-term relationships and the development of customized solutions."
Both Wellman and Integrity's vice president, Holly Barajas, held multiple positions within Lindy Manufacturing and worked closely on projects from beginning to end. She oversaw all aspects of production, shipping, and customer service, in addition to marketing and plant management. The decision to create the new company included joining forces with another Lindy Manufacturing employee, Sean Stack, who currently serves as Integrity's General Manager.
"Our goal for Integrity is to take American manufacturing to a new level," says Wellman. "That means putting a priority on quality and innovation, giving our employees the training and support they need and working collaboratively with both them and our clients."
Integrity Manufacturing Inc's management team: Holly Barajas, vice-president; Cheryl Wellman, president and owner; Sean Stack, general manager
It’s frustrating enough for furnace operators to encounter downtime due to failure or faulty equipment, but more so when it can be avoided adhering to basic maintenance procedures and adopting habits of diligence and quick thinking.
Andrew Alborghetti of TAV Vacuum Furnaces offers “5 tips for preventing faults caused by the process water in the cooling system [of a vacuum furnace or by] the use of unsuitable equipment.” In addition, he suggests steps to take when an emergency develops.
In a nutshell,
Maintain specific purity standards of the process water.
Prevent dangerous enrichment by maintaining valves.
Keep an eye on your process water temperature.
Avoid damage from external cold temperatures.
Consider investing in a closed circuit adiabaticwater cooling system.
An excerpt:
“For the vacuum furnace to meet the considerable need for water it must have sufficient capacity (tub or tank) to quickly transfer heat from the furnace and from the load. The capacity of the tank determines the size of the system for cooling the water contained in it. Of course, the bigger the tank, the smaller the water cooling system it contains. When there are numerous furnaces, the size of the tank is calculated based on averaged values for behavior in the respective heat cycles.” ~ TAV Vacuum Furnaces
Click below for more on the 5 tips as well as steps you can take should your shop face an emergency such as a power outage that affects the water cooling system
A corporation based in Richmond, Virginia, that produces metals equipment for a broad range of manufacturing applications recently announced that it was awarded an $8 million tubing order.
Bristol Metals LLC, a subsidiary of Synalloy Corporation, has begun shipment of the product from its Bristol, Tennessee, and Munhall, Pennsylvania, facilities. The company stated that this is the single largest order of its type that Bristol Metals has received since being acquired by Synalloy.
Synalloyengages in a number of diverse business activities including the production of stainless steel pipe and tubing, galvanized pipe and tubing, fiberglass and steel storage tanks, specialty chemicals and the master distribution of seamless carbon pipe and tubing.
From an article provided by the Office of Technology Commercialization and Partnerships and published at Tech Briefs, heat treaters and other students of metal alloys can glean valuable information about hardface coating systems developed to protect from and build resistance to high wear deterioration, weak interfacial bonding, and corrosion.
In applications ranging from sports equipment to turbine blades, and power-generating surfaces to military hardware,
“Metal alloys, such as titanium alloys and steels, are known to have a good combination of mechanical properties for many structural applications, but these metal alloys do not meet the wear and corrosion resistance requirements for some structural applications. . . . To overcome these shortcomings and provide high wear- and corrosion-resistant surfaces on metal alloy substrates, surface alloying and reactive surface modification have been developed — depositing and post-heat-treating a unique combination of materials, selected based upon the substrate material and specific application environment.” ~ Tech Briefs
A Canadian commercial heat treater has expanded their heat treatment production capability with the purchase of two furnaces, installed at the company’s newly built manufacturing facility in Chateauguay (suburb Montreal) and to be used for general heat treating.
Tracy Dougherty, sales manager at AFC-Holcroft
Thermetco of Montreal, the largest commercial heat treater in Quebec, purchased a new UBQ (Universal Batch Quench) furnace and a new UBT (Universal Batch Temper) furnaces from Michigan-based industrial furnace manufacturer AFC-Holcroft to serve customers in the automotive, aerospace, energy and petrochemical industries. The equipment offers the capability of providing metallurgical processes such as carburizing, carbonitriding, annealing, tempering, stress relieving, and other processes.
“The Thermetco team has a history of building thermal processing equipment in the past and were able to quickly identify many of the key factors that make the UBQ an industry leader, including recovery rates, maintainability, Batchmaster™ controls, Remote Diagnostics™, energy saving high/low endo flow, multiple speed quench, etc.,” said Tracy Dougherty, sales manager at AFC-Holcroft. “This order marks the first purchase of AFCHolcroft equipment by Thermetco. We’re very excited about the opportunity to be a part of the Thermetco expansion plans.”
A Belgian stainless steel producer recently contracted with a plant supplier to the metallurgical industry to provide an annealing and pickling line for stainless steel cold strip.
SMS group will deliver the line to Aperam Stainless at its Genk plant in Belgium. Production start is scheduled for 2020. With this investment in state-of-the-art and future-oriented plant technology, Aperam will enlarge its product range by material grades for the most demanding applications and improve lead time and flexibility to meet the market demand.
The line will be equipped with a horizontal Drever annealing furnace and a multi-stage pickling section in addition to a four-high skin-pass mill stand and a side trimmer. The new annealing and pickling line will be the fourth one SMS group is going to install at Aperam’s Genk site.
The line will process both austenitic and ferritic grades.
Running a heat treat shop is more than just firing up a furnace to treat components; it’s doing so in a way that is both efficient and safe.
Today’s Technical Tuesday is a helpful article from Control Engineering about burners for gas-fired heat treating furnaces, their differences and how they are best utilized in different heat treating applications, technological advances in controls engineering, and combustion safety. The article draws on the skills and knowledge of several in the industry who have contributed to the advances and development in burner manufacturing, operation, and safety.
A couple of excerpts:
“With a careful engineering analysis, it often is possible to obtain more efficiency by optimizing either process or system control. As an added benefit, in many cases, such optimization does not require substantial physical hardware upgrades.” ~ Michael Cochran, marketing engineer, combustion systems at Bloom Engineering Company Inc.
“The goal of both regenerative and recuperative designs is to capture heat energy that would otherwise be wasted.” ~ Control Engineering
Here is what readers are saying about recent posts on Heat Treat Today. As is our policy, we allowed the original author to preview and respond to this reader feedback. See Greg Odenthal’s response at the bottom of this post.
William (Bill) Jones of Solar Atmospheres Inc. on the Heat Treat Radio podcast interview with Greg Odenthal of ITC Coatings. Click here for the podcast (transcript here):
William R. Jones, FASM, Solar Atmospheres Inc.
Re: Heat Treat Radio: ITC Coatings
This would be a poor selection for a vacuum furnace as it is well known that ceramic coatings and the like are hydroscopic and will absorb water from the atmosphere when opening the furnace to air for work unloading and reloading, with adverse effects on following vacuum pump down, i.e., to pump out the absorbed water vapor.
With respect to ceramic lined refractory insulated atmospheric furnaces: I can respect the coating for sealing an older furnace lining for porosity and lining leaks to the outer furnace wall and for improving re-radiation to the work load with well-known surface emissivity improvement. This is not an easy coating to apply and will require maintenance “man-hours”. So one has to balance the coating time and coating cost compared to furnace out of production cost. Furnaces are like airplanes, when sitting on the ground for any purpose, they lose money.
Now, when looking at furnace hot zone efficiency, one has to review power losses both before and after changes such as coatings. With an electric furnace a totalizing wattmeter or with a gas totalizing gas meter similar to our utility company meters. Such data needs to be presented for both furnace before and after coatings on an exact furnace and production cycle.
William R. Jones, FASM
Solar Atmospheres Inc.
We offered Greg Odenthal of ITC Coatings the opportunity to respond:
Greg Odenthal, Director of Engineering & Technical Operations, ITC| International Technical Ceramics, LLC
Mr. Jones,
I cannot agree or disagree with you regarding your opinion that ITC Coatings are a poor selection for vacuum furnaces as we have never tested in nor targeted this industry. It is true that ceramic coatings are hydroscopic; however, I’m not sure just how much water/moisture a layer of ceramic coating only 1 to 2 mils thick will absorb. With that being said, any moisture absorbed would wick away in a very short period of time. Whether or not they are good for the vacuum heat treating industry is still up for discussion.
As for your comment regarding that this is not an easy coating to apply, I must tell you that you are wrong. I have been onsite on just about every installation that we have done and our crew size can be very small. For an average size heat treat or forge furnace — for example, 32’ L x 16’ H x 15’ W with a new ceramic fiber lining — a crew of two men can and have coated the entire square foot surface area in an eight (8) hour shift. The cost of the coatings and labor to install is pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of regularly scheduled downturns every 3 to 4 months to pack joints and cracks with new fiber, trying to prevent heat loss and increasing fuel consumption. We have current customers that have not done any refractory maintenance in four to five years and now only have one outage per year for their yearly furnace inspection. Once installed, the ITC Coatings increase a furnace’s efficiency by reducing refractory maintenance, reducing fuel consumption, improving temperature uniformity, improving product quality, improving turnaround times, along with a host of additional benefits, thus preventing the furnace from costing the customer money, unlike your grounded airplane analogy.
In regard to hot zone efficiency and gas/power reduction, we have been working with the gas supply companies in Canada who are currently monitoring our customers’ fuel usage and see the reductions. They are now beginning to give current and potential customers money for this type of upgrade, upwards of 50% of the cost to install ITC Coatings. We do not just sell ceramic coatings, we provide the customer with a complete engineered solution along with a total Btu savings analysis for each furnace we quote. Each Btu savings analysis is unique to that furnace and based on operational data supplied by the customer. We have also provided before and after thermal imaging of the furnace as proof that the heat transfer/loss through the refractory and to the shell is less, so you do not necessarily need totalizing meters to prove energy savings.
If you would like to learn more about ITC Coatings and our technology, I encourage you to contact me and discuss this topic in greater detail.
Regards,
Greg Odenthal
Director of Engineering & Technical Operations
ITC| International Technical Ceramics, LLC
We welcome your inquiries to and feedback on Heat Treat Today articles. Submit your questions/comments to editor@heattreattoday.com.
The next phase in development has begun in the construction of the nation’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford,
The vessel returned to the Newport News, Virginia, shipyard recently for planned upgrades and repairs, including addressing problems involving the gear that’s used to catch fighter jets as they land and a ship propulsion problem that was created by a manufacturing defect.
A Dover, Ohio, engineering consultant group and manufacturer of custom automated machine equipment recently broke ground on a 25,000 sq ft design and manufacturing facility to expand their operations.
Gemini Industrial Machine Group, LLC, expects to open the facility in the spring of 2019, according to Jason Johnson, president of Gemini.
“Basically, we build equipment for area manufacturers,” said Johnson. “So they come to us with needs in automation or specialized equipment inside their facilities. We take that, and our engineers get to work, design it. We build it. We test it — everything in-house. And then I deliver it as well. It can be something as simple as a custom metal bracket or a fully automated robot that can process 20,000 parts in a shift and run millions of parts annually.”
