In March we commissioned the second vacuum carburizing furnace at the Rockford plant, doubling our in-house heat-treatment capacity and formally ending our last outsourced hardening contract.

The practical difference for customers is time and control. When hardening happened off-site, every lot spent up to three weeks in transit and queue at the heat treater — time we could neither schedule nor guarantee. That buffer is now gone: gears move from the hobbing cell to the furnace on the same shift.

The metallurgical difference is just as real. Low-pressure carburizing produces a cleaner case with no intergranular oxidation, which means less stock to remove in grinding and more consistent case depth at the tooth root — exactly where fatigue failures start. Distortion is lower too, since gas quenching is far gentler than oil.

The new line also gives us heat-lot-level traceability inside our own MES. Every furnace charge is logged against the part serials it contained, and that record ships with your certification package for the next ten years.