Heat Treat Tales: Shop Floor Failures

Fifty-three years ago, an ad was placed by a furnace company in a Chicago newspaper for a laboratory technician trainee. I arrived for the interview dressed in my finest work clothes, a denim work shirt, blue jeans, and work boots. The laboratory manager asked me if I minded getting dirty and my answer was, I didn’t since I was unemployed. We went to the lab and while there I got to see an integral quench atmosphere furnace being loaded. It was startling to see the flame curtain, a load going into the furnace and the burn-off stacks light up after the door closed. It was one of the coolest things I have seen, and the lab manager asked me if I could do that. My answer was an enthusiastic yes, and at that moment my career started in heat treating.

That career path is an interesting one from the perspective of manufacturing diversity with heat treating being the common thread. I have worked at two commercial heat-treating firms, a forge, a bearing manufacturer, a heavy-truck leaf spring plant, an aluminum die caster and a fastener distributor. My education consisted of shop floor problems at these plants and manifested themselves as opportunities to learn about hardness, hardenability, grain size, distortion, quench cracks, microstructure irregularities and residual stress. Please join me as I share some of these tales about what went wrong on the shop floor.