Most shops send their tooling out for heat treatment. We don't.
Outsourcing heat treat means adding 3–5 days of lead time every time a die needs hardening, annealing, or tempering — and those days compound fast when you're mid-development or responding to a production issue.
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We harden tool steels — D2, A2, H13, M2, and S7 — to specified Rockwell hardness targets for die sections, punches, retainers, and wearing surfaces. Proper hardening is the difference between a tool that holds tolerance for 500,000 cycles and one that wears out in 50,000. We control soak time and temperature precisely to hit your target hardness without introducing distortion or cracking.
After hardening, all tooling is tempered to relieve internal stress and reduce brittleness. Tempering temperature is determined by the steel grade and application — aggressive forming operations need tougher tools; precision grinding requires harder ones. We document every cycle.
When tooling sections need to be re-machined after hardening, we anneal them to restore machinability. This is a routine part of our die repair workflow — we soften, re-cut, re-harden, and return the tool to service without the multi-week delay of external vendors.
Large welded fabrications and repaired die sections are stress-relieved before finish grinding to prevent movement on the grinder and maintain dimensional stability in production.
Our Vulcan A1750 high-temperature chamber furnace reaches 1,100°C (2,012°F) — capable of processing the full range of tool steels used in progressive and transfer die construction. Temperature uniformity is validated by thermocouple placement across the load, and every cycle is logged with time, temperature, and atmosphere data for traceability.
In high-volume manufacturing, a die that needs heat treatment creates a schedule decision: do you run a backup tool (if you have one), slow the line, or wait? If your supplier is shipping tooling to an outside heat treater, you’re waiting days for a process that takes hours. Our in-house furnace turns that decision into a non-event.
This matters most in three situations:
Heat treat doesn’t exist in isolation — it’s one step in our closed-loop die maintenance system. Our Wire EDM, CNC machining centers, surface grinders, and heat treat furnace all operate in the same 18,000 sq. ft. toolroom. When a die needs repair, every resource required to return it to service is within 200 feet.
This is what we mean by ‘uptime guarantee.’ It’s not a promise — it’s a floor plan.
We carry the certifications that allow you to sell into regulated markets. Our quality lab features Zeiss CMMs for certification and Hexagon Portable Arms for reverse engineering.
EV & ICE
Turnkey Cosmetic Assemblies
Complete Box Builds
Primarily tooling — die sections, punches, retainers, and wearing components. Production part heat treatment is evaluated on a case-by-case basis depending on steel grade and geometry.
Same-day for most tooling repairs in our standard die maintenance workflow. New tool sections going through a full harden-and-temper cycle are typically completed within 24 hours of being ready to process.
Rockwell hardness testing (HRC) is performed on representative test blocks processed with each load, and on the tooling itself at critical wear surfaces. Results are documented and available for quality records.
Your production schedule shouldn’t depend on an outside vendor’s furnace availability. Ours doesn’t. Talk to our engineering team about what integrated heat treat means for your program’s uptime.
