Mistreating your metal leads to a loss in profit and productivity to be sure to consider everything here when it comes to your heat treating process.
1. Avoid Overheating
Overheating and burning your metals is a real possibility when you're dealing with low allow metals. Decarburization is often the culprit for negatively impacting or destroying your steel. When your temperature goes above 1200° C, your steel or low allow metals are up for being damaged.
The mechanical properties of your metals become subject to deterioration when heat treatment comes before the forging process. Mechanical processes must be completed before you heat your metal. If you're looking to avoid mechanical deficiencies from too much heat, your metal needs to be treated in advance.
Treated metal that requires too much heat affects the toughness and strength of the metal. If you notice that the surface of your metal has the kind of bumpiness you'd find on an orange peel, with hard and soft spots everywhere, it's been overheated.
The impact of overheating isn't unavoidable. It's possible to avoid the impact by carefully controlling the temperature of your heat source. By checking the tools that you're using, ensuring that they've been protected with anti-decarburizing solutions, ensures that they're heated properly.
Metal that's unevenly heated sometimes suffers from being heated too quickly. Allow it to slowly and naturally cool down to avoid these problems.
2. Watch For Brittleness
Brittle metal is dangerous as it can crack when you least expect it, causing injuries or damage to your tools or equipment. Brittleness is a problem that occurs when you apply too much heat to metal. If you don't temper your metal properly, you'll expose your metal products to potential brittleness.
Brittleness occurs when metal is tempered for too short of a time. Lower your hardening temperature and allow for proper tempering and you'll avoid brittleness.
If you want to correct brittleness, increase your hardening temperature and the amount of time you're giving your metal if you're noticing improper tempering. If your metal suffers from too much hardness, change your formula.
3. Use the Right Metal
While many new metal workers don't know the distinction between different types of steel, they don't always know how their mistakes can cost them. Not every alloy of steel is suitable for heat treating. Some alloys make metals that won't have the right amount of impact strength when they're treated.
A variety of factors affect the impact strength of metals that have been treated. The number and type of impurities in a metal are one of the most important factors in determining the success of heat treatment.
Steel that's mixed with the wrong set of other elements leads to a surface condition less than optimal for hardening. Mechanical or thermal treatments administered to the wrong type of metal lead to problems later on.
4. Avoid Warping and Deformities
In order to avoid warping your metals before they're treated, the metal treatment has to be normalized. Maintain even temperatures throughout and provide the right amount of treatment time in advance.
Your furnace temperature must be maintained throughout the entirety of your treatment process. Metal must be stabilized to prevent movement. This is especially important during the quenching process if you want to avoid warping.
Time each step as you go along. Proper timing ensures that each step is completed properly.
Stressing metal before the treatment process introduces issues as well. If you're dealing with information and warping, ensure that you've gon through some stress relief measures and wait until machining is complete.
5. Watch For Cooling Fractures
Cooling fractures are pretty common when you're dealing with uneven heating or rapid cool down. Even overheating inspires some fractures since bringing your metal to any extreme is bad for it.
Preheat your metal to meet the heating treatment. Every metal and alloy has its own limits, taking into account size and shape as well. If you want to avoid cooling fractures, first consider the hardness capacity of the metal you're dealing with.
Select your tools based on the amount of hardening and shape that you're dealing with.
Fractures occur during the quenching process often. Before you've tempered your metal, ensure that you're following proper standards when quenching your metal. Cold tools and austenite residue are common culprits of cooling fractures.
If you're planning on tempering your metal after it's hardened, you need to time everything out. Tempering needs to be done right after it's hardened and then treatment needs to be administered within the right period of time. If you're looking to avoid cooling fractures, your treatment is your best weapon for combating this.
If your facility isn't temperature controlled, you'll invite all kinds of changes to your manufacturing process. When this happens, all of your hard work will go right out the window. If you're manufacturing high-end or precise metal work, you'll risk damaging your reputation without a well-built facility.
Steel Heat Treating Takes Effort
If you want your steel to last a long time and for your products to last a long time, you need to learn all about steel heat treating. When you're thinking about how to deal with your metals, consider the process from start to finish and write down your timing along the way. This ensures you don't run into any problems from moving too fast or too slow.
For more information about how tempering is done at one of the largest Slovenian providers of heat treatment, check out our guide.
