Heat treating is an extremely useful process. Through its proper application, it can change the properties of steel, hardening materials that need extra wear resistance, or softening materials to make them more suitable for cold forging or deep drawing. Tool, Die, and Mold steels can all achieve extremely impressive properties in part from the heat treatment of the steel. However…
Improper heat treatment is responsible for 70% of all Tool and Die Steel failures.
Every year, millions of dollars’ worth of valuable tooling components are carefully designed and machined, only to be sent to the heat treatment facility with little information on how to harden them. As a result, millions of production dollars are lost when parts fail prematurely due to less-than-optimum heat treatment.
After all, heat treatment can not only harden material. If the incorrect treatment is applied to a material, it can soften it, or make it much more brittle. In both cases, your steel comes back much weaker than it should.
It’s important to remember that you should never assume that the Heat Treaters will be able to just fill in the blanks’ with the correct procedures. Just a few hours of the wrong heat treatment can instantly negate hundreds of hours spent making the tool. Such mistakes can be particularly devastating in Tool, Die, and Mold steels.
Nobody Knows Our Material Like We Do
We’ll make sure your Heat Treater has all the information they need to do the job right.
Never leave heat treatment to chance or to the ‘best guess’ of the Heat Treater, particularly when you’re working with specialty materials, such as our DC53 or DCMX. Make sure you get detailed hardening, quenching, and tempering instructions and specifications directly from the steel manufacturer. Use that information to write out a detailed description for the heat treatment regarding minimum temperatures, soaking times, if double or triple tempering is required, and the required minimum ‘as-quenched’ hardness. Finally—and most importantly—make sure that the Heat Treater provides you with a detailed chart for the entire process and after completion, verifying that the procedure and results all fall into accordance with your specification.
At Titus Steel, we readily provide you with detailed charts containing everything you need to provide a detailed, accurate order for heat treatment that leaves nothing up to guesswork or chance, while providing a resource against which you can measure their reports to make sure their treatment meets our rigorous standards.
Don’t Take Chances, Particularly with Tool, Die and Mold Steels that Heat Treatment to Achieve Their Ultimate Performance
At Titus Steel, we aren’t just here to sell you steel. We’re here to provide you with the finest-quality, high-performing, and best-suited materials for your tool and die steel needs. As such, we want to provide you with every resource that we can to make sure that your tool and die materials are properly handled every step of the way.
To learn more about how we stand by our products, contact us today.