(November 28) - Solar Atmospheres (Souderton, Pa.; ) established an R&D team to integrate the practical wisdom of the vacuum heat-treating experiences at Solar and the developing needs of the metals manufacturing industry. William R. Jones, CEO at Solar, will guide the team. Harry Antes, Ph.D. and Don Jordan, vice president of heat treating, will understand and explain the physical and structural changes that occur in the heat treating process. Virginia Osterman, Ph.D., technical director, brings a chemistry perspective to evaluate material transformations. As project engineer, Trevor Jones will be responsible for processing parts for analysis and evaluation by the team. Current projects include the refinement of the vacuum carburizing cycle with insitu high-pressure gas quenching. Future projects involve nitriding and nitrocarburizing.
New Job Opportunities: Heat Treating Contract Auditors (PRI)
(November 28) - Ever wanted to travel the globe helping heat treaters improve their operations? Well it looks as if PRI has some openings for just such a ride. Click here to read all about it.
GM to Close 9 Facilities, Slash 30,000 Jobs
(November 21) - GM has announced plans to save $7B per year today that include closing its Oklahoma City and Lansing, Michigan assembly plants in 2006, followed in 2008 with the closing of its Doraville, Georgia plant. In addition, GM said it will close six other facilities that include powertrain, stamping service and parts facilities, In all the closures will eliminate 30,000 hourly jobs. Read the full story here.
Unions Say Delphi Plans to Cut 24,000 Jobs and Radically Cut Pay
(November 17) - More bad news on the Delphi front this week. While many have headed off for the cheap labor of China and Southeast Asia, Delphi is trying to find a way to make their North American operations profitable. In addition to cutting some 24,000 workers, union officials state that Delphi intends to drop average production worker compensation packages from their current $65/hour to roughly $21/hour (that includes health care and retirement). Delphi insists the offer is competitive with some of their competitors, but I doubt that sits easy with the worker who has two car payments and a mortgage. You can read the full article here.
So what is the best way for a big manufacturing company like Delphi to keep that competitive edge against places like China or Thailand where people are making $1,500-2,500 per YEAR for similar work? Are we content to see either our manufacturing economy or our middle class simply disappear or are there better solutions? Post your thoughts!
(November 14) - Today we have a few shots from TwinVac Johor Malaysia. TwinVac is a medium sized commercial heat treat shop located in Singapore and serviced by the crew at CHS-Asia. TwinVac just opened a new factory in Johor Malaysia (just across the bridge from Singapore). The equipment is a combination of new and rebuilt lines and CHS-Asia did the "turnkey" installation of all the equipment and the rebuild of portions of the equipment. The shots are before, during and after. Seems like CHS-Asia is doing all things heat treat these days!
SECO/WARWICK Receives Order
(November 14) - Looks like SECO just nabbed a new furnace order. In keeping with our recent "Asia Theme" the order comes from non other than SAPA Heat Transfer of Shanghai, China.
SAPA Heat Transfer has purchased a two Chamber batch CAB brazing furnace system for their facility in Shanghai, China. The unit is a side-loading CAB furnace with a purging/cooling chamber and convection-heating chamber. The furnace is a compact design with an internal recirculation fan in the braze chamber and in the cooling chamber that uses minimum of floor space. Vertically mounted heating elements and ceramic fiber thermal insulation provide reliable service in this heavy-duty furnace designed for the industrial workplace. The power supply and the cooling system are generously sized for a variety of heat exchanger brazing requirements. The hot-gas recirculation fan provides fast and uniform temperature heat-up inside the braze chamber. The fan in the cooling chamber together with a heat exchanger in the air stream provides uniform cooling of the load after brazing.
(November 10) - After our Thailand visit we have news of a big heat treat show in Beijing this week. Word is the traffic was very good with more western companies exhibiting than ever. Here are some shots from the show.
Below is a photo of some of the show's attendees and one exhibitor. From left to right we have heat treat "blogger" Gordon Montgomery and Stephen Thompson, both attendees representing SSI, and on the right is Mr. Yakun Liu, former GM of Beijing Waves who is now the GM of MMI-China. Liu is also Chairman of Beijing Waves and the company's majority share holder. Liu was there running MMI-China's booth. He's also a very nice and fun guy who has a great Karaoke voice!
Dowa, one of the world's largest heat treaters & furnace manufacturers, had a splashy booth
Yakun Liu and his team from MMI-China had a busy show...
Not far from MMI-China was SSI's distrubutor, Shanghai Shengmao...
Shanghai PowerMax, a Marstate company that builds AFC furnaces in China was also present. That's Andy Chen, GM of PowerMax in the photo...
More Southeast Asia Photos
(November 8) - Based on this (scroll to the last entry) it looks like Gord on his "blog" site ( The Monty ) can't remember the names of anyone from Marathon these days - I guess his "bosses" at SSI have a bit of control over his "news" regardless of what he says...but you can always get a less biased bit of news here at HTN!
Anyway, there's no doubt that a lot of folks learned a lot and had good times at SEAHTA's first conference in Bangkok last week. Here are some more shots from CHS-Asia, the company that sponsored the conference:
In this picture Al Gunow (Solar Manufacturing) has just made dinner for everyone! Actually, this is at a great restaurant that's supposed to be the largest outside dining in Asia. Mark Ratliff of Avion (stop-off coatings) is on Al's left:
Here's a good photo of the folks awaiting that tasty entree from Al:
And the obligatory shots of our man Randy and the conference in session:
Thanks again to David & Randy at CHS-Asia for putting on such a great show!
VFS Kickin' in Asia
(November 7) - For many years VFS dominated vacuum sales in Asia thanks to Marstate (Taiwan) and Beijing Waves' Yakun Liu (China). In recent years, however, VFS has suffered an onslaught of low-priced competition including being outbid by their pseudo parent (Ipsen) on a few jobs. Well it seems the tide is turning! VFS, always a premium brand in Asia, has just landed orders for three new furnaces in Taiwan, China & Singapore. Congratulations to Rick Jones who had to be instrumental in pushing these lines. Here's the official PR:
Vacuum Furnace Systems (VFS) Corp. (Souderton, Pa.; http://www.vfscorp.com) received three orders from different customers in Taiwan, China and Singapore for vacuum furnaces that will be used to heat treat aircraft components. The Taiwan order is for a horizontal internal quench furnace with a 36 in. by 36 in. by 48 in. graphite-insulated hot zone, GraForm curved graphite heating elements and a 2-bar gas quench system. The furnace for China is the same type and size, but includes an all-metal hot zone with ribbed molybdenum elements and a CompuVac supervisory control system. The Singapore order is for a horizontal external quench furnace with a graphite-insulated 36 in. by 30 in. by 48 in. hot zone, GraForm curved graphite heating elements and a 2-bar gas quench system. Shipping dates range from November 2005 to April 2006.
SEAHTA Heat Treat Seminar
(November 2, 2005, Bangkok, Thailand) - The first ever Southeast Asia Heat Treatment Association Seminar went over quite well this week in Bangkok. Turnout was a bit over 100 with about 60 of the areas heat treating companies represented. Talks ranged from carburization technologies to LPC to quenchant maintainance. All in all a very good two days that will be repeated annually. Incidentally, the conference was sponsored by CHS-Asia who seem to be growing dramatically these days. People have long talked about heat treat growth in China, but it would appear that Southeast Asia is growing just as fast if not faster these days. With Toyota slated to open one of the world's largest car factories in Thailand soon the trend is sure to continue.
Here's a shot of David Pickup (CHS-Asia) and Eric Boltz (Marathon Sensors) from the show. We should have a few additional shots in the coming days.
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