Heat-Treating Air-Hardening Tool Steels

During any project there can be a whole batch of parts or components that must first be engineered, then rough machined. This amounts to a good deal of time and money. The parts must be made slightly oversize to allow for finish grinding. We’re going to pick up on the process right at this point and walk through the heat treat process. Keep in mind it can take a few hours, or even months of design, calculations, and tedious research to put together the design and machine the parts to be ready for heat-treating. All the hours of designing, prepping the pieces of steel, machining to exact tolerances, all boil down for either failure, limited success, or knock it out of the ball park greatness, in just a couple hours of heat treatment. All the time and money put into the project now rest in the hands of the heat treater and he can affect the outcome of the project for success, or failure. To make sure the parts will give long life and be properly heat-treated, we will walk you through the process step-by-step.