A blacksmith sweating over an open flame is not the image most heat treaters immediately identify with in 2024. In the present, heat treating tends to look more like a trained metallurgist supervising a complex brazing operation. Yet we should not throw out the blacksmith and his hammer, even though bridging the gap between past and present is a tough job. Bennett Heat Treating & Brazing Co., Inc. is known for doing just that.
This New Jersey heat treater was originally founded by Wilbur Bennett (a one-armed blacksmith turned heat treater) and was purchased by Anthony Quaglia in 1954. They make it their job to bridge the knowledge gap between the experienced and the novice heat treaters within their own team. After the sudden death of David Quaglia in 2017, John Quaglia leveraged his father’s foundational expertise to build a highly skilled team of seasoned veterans and emerging talent, which will one day include his children Anthony and Abby Quaglia. Today, Bennett Heat Treating has over 100 years of knowledge and over three generations of expertise to draw from in order to create an innovative future.
Technology and equipment are the keys to an innovative future, but new technology would be useless without inherited expertise. Bennett has been able to combine their modern equipment with veteran experience to create heat treating processes that are reliable. For example, their neutral salt bath with marquenching enables clients to control dimensions of parts with tight tolerances at high hardness requirements. The marquenching process is so repeatable that a few clients intentionally machine their intricate helical gears out of tolerance because they are sure Bennett’s process will return the parts to tolerance.
A solid team of knowledgeable experts who will bridge the heat treat industry’s generational gap also seamlessly meets the needs of clients. For Bennett’s major private, aerospace prime, and U.S. military clients, the metallurgical consultant team within Bennett bases its success on carefully listening to clients, identifying major lessons learned in the past, and collaborating with clients to methodize production processes that avoid past mistakes.
John Quaglia recalls an example of how his team leads with expertise to collaborate with clients: a curved, thin part requiring nitriding on one area and optional nitriding all over it. After years of nitriding these parts, the team noted that when both sides of the part were nitrided, the edges chipped and the part would bow. Collaborating with the client, Bennett confirmed that only one side of the part needed to be nitrided. The team then developed tooling that was able to mask the part while maintaining the part’s dimensions.
In the future, Bennett Heat Treating & Brazing Co. intends to focus on gaining new equipment and building a cohesive team of employees to continue the high level of precision and quality work. No doubt, they will continue to seek to bridge the gap between seasoned heat treaters and new members on the scene through close communication — both amongst themselves and with clients. While the team will not be found in a blacksmith’s forge of the past, they will be collaborating with veteran experts and learning to apply that wisdom to meet the needs of present and future clients.
For more information:
Bennett Heat Treating & Brazing Co., Inc.
690 Ferry Street
Newark, NJ 07105
johnquaglia@bennettheat.com
www.bennettheat.com
