The brain drain is real. As new professionals enter the industry, Heat Treat Today is helping to ensure that young and old inquiring minds can connect with and grow from the experiences of high-value industry experts. Get to know the first Heat Treat Today Consultant: Dan Kay.
Owner
Kay & Associates
I am Dan Kay (which is a shortened form of my birth name: William Daniel Kay). Although I was born in Ohio, I grew up in New Jersey, went to college (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in New York State, and graduated with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering. I grew up in a wonderful family, as the third child out of six children that my parents had. They were both strong spiritual leaders, too, shaping our Christian faith and helping us to make it a strong foundation in our lives. I am married to a wonderful woman, and we’ll be celebrating our 55th wedding anniversary together in June. She continues to be a real blessing to me in so many ways. My home is in Simsbury, CT, where we have now lived for the past 25 years
Source: Kay & Associates
Dan Kay’s biggest strength is teaching and training. Being able to effectively communicate to others, verbally and in writing, to bring about positive change in others is not easy in today’s world, but it is something Dan believes he has learned to do well. Currently, Dan uses his teaching skills at brazing seminars that help to increase productivity and reduce scrap and rework.
For almost 60 years, Dan has been involved in the heat treating industry. His specialty is brazing: the joining of metal parts together to form complex assemblies, using a brazing filler metal (BFM) that melts and flows by capillary action into joints between the component parts making up that complex assembly. Out of these 60 years, Dan has many stories, but one stands out: discovering the cause of a mushy joint in tweezers used in the medical industry. After carefully studying the manufacturer’s operations, Dan suggested waiting several seconds after brazing by induction heating and before quenching, allowing the filler metal to solidify completely. After this, the tweezers no longer broke when doctors used them to stitch up patients.
Source: Kay & Associates
In Dan’s opinion, brazing and heat treating need to form a stronger partnership in the years ahead. Increasingly more metals require heat treating to obtain optimal properties for end-use service conditions. Brazing is also a growing industry, enabling more and more complex parts to be created, many of which need enhanced properties for successful use in the field. This will typically require more and more vacuum brazing/heat treat to be done, and heat treat personnel need to become familiar with brazing and its requirements, so that mistakes will not occur. Vacuum furnaces need to have additional complex internal heat treat and quench capabilities for a wide variety of metals, including aluminum, to allow such parts to be brazed, and then heat treated and quenched in multi-bar furnaces.
To learn more from Dan, visit his website kaybrazing.com/seminars to attend his next seminar
