Increased Job Capacity

Since we have opened our new facility we are constantly adding new equipment to it. Some of these new machines simply offer increased job capacity and quality to our arsenal while others add entirely new capabilities. Vacu Braze has recently merged with Pennsylvania Metallurgical Inc, and with it we have taken much of their equipment.

VACUUM HEAT TREATING

Vacu Braze specializes in vacuum heat treating precision parts. This process is precisely controlled and produces a clean, distortion free part. This is achieved by using uniform heating and quenching with up to 12 bar of nitrogen, argon, and ultra-high purity argon. Almost any time of machined part can benefit from this process, tool & die sets to sensitive medical equipment all use vacuum heat treatment as their preferred process type.

Vacuum heat treatment is environmentally friendly and diverse as well. When done under vacuum, hardening, age hardening, and annealing can keep any part bright and without scale. Some of the other services we offer in our vacuum furnaces include, stress relieving, sintering (causing a powdered material to solidify under heat), and diffusion bonding (solid state welding that joins two similar or dissimilar metals to one another). Many materials are able to benefit from these processes such as copper, nickel bases, stainless steels, tool steels, titanium and more.

VACUUM BRAZING

Vacuum brazing shares many similarities with vacuum heat treating, such as uniform heating and cooling in a controlled environment. Vacu Braze utilizes various brazing alloys such as copper, nickel, silver, and gold to create a strong inter-metallic bond between two pieces. All brazing processes conform with MIL, AMS, and AWS standards.

Brazing is used to assemble pieces and parts from a wide variety of fields. We offer precision braze work for prototypes and experimental parts. Vacu Braze is also well equipped to handle not only low volume, but high-volume work adequately. Some other services we offer for brazing include induction and torch brazing.

ATMOSPHERIC HEAT TREATING

Vacu Braze has recently merged with Pennsylvania Metallurgical Inc, and with this merge we have also taken up their atmospheric heat treatment equipment. This process of heat treatment is commonly used to harden a full part or just the surface in a carburizing process. We now have furnaces to handle all sizes of parts, from many industries such as automotive, medical, and power generation.

We offer many services through this type of heat treatment, such as carburizing. Carburizing is a process that causes a steel to absorb carbon into its surface to produce a very hard surface, or case. This benefits the part by creating a tough wear surface with increased fatigue strength. Carbon nitriding or carbonitriding is a similar process to carburization, however it also includes nitrogen in the surface of the part as well as carbon. The nitrogen helps the part maintain hardness in a high heat setting. Neutral hardening is also offered, and is used to attain a high hardness on a part.

We also offer processes that prepare parts for further heat treatment or machining. Stress relieving is a process that typically holds around temperatures from 1100-1200 degrees Fahrenheit, in order to relieve stresses from cutting or welding. Annealing is a similar process in which steel is heated to a specific temperature and cooled very slowly in order to remove stress from the material, causing it to become soft and tougher. Quench and temper processes involve hardening a material and tempering it back to achieve a desired hardness. Normalizing is an annealing process in which a material is held at a target temperature for a short time and cooled slowly to reduce stress.

METALLURGICAL CONSULTING

We offer consulting to new and existing customers to help engineer and design parts to ensure proper a proper model for heat treatment or brazing. This can involve designing the aesthetics of the part, or selecting a material to create it out of.

ADDITIONAL SERVICES

Cryogenic treatments take your parts down below -300 degrees Fahrenheit. This can have a large effect on mechanical properties of materials if there is austenite left in the part after heat treatment. The process is designed to increase the amount of martensite in the steels composition. This increases the hardness and creates a greater wear resistant surface.

We offer glass beading as a form of cleaning and preparing parts for a finishing process. Vacu Braze can glass bead parts to get rid of discoloration and scale. In our new facility we have automatic glass beaders online as well.

Vacu Braze offers material verification through atomic emission spectrography. This allows us to detect common elements in various steels to determine your exact material, and in turn a more defined heat treatment process.

Vacu Braze can certify jobs with hardness testing results. We offer Rockwell and Brinell testing on various scales, as well as Knoop and Vickers done under a microscope. We also have the ability to etch test samples in order to see the metallic structure under a microscope.

Nitriding is similar to carburizing as it involves putting a hard case on to a part. However, it is a much thinner and harder case that contains nitrogen. It is commonly used to produce a hard wear surface with great fatigue strength on parts.

Vacu Braze is always working to improve our turnaround times for all jobs. We typically offer a 5 day turn around cycle, but there are shorter options for smaller lots.