Flame Hardening

Cincinnati Steel Treating (CST) offers flame hardening services for many different types of parts and applications. Flame hardening can be performed using hand held instruments, specialized lathes, or with distinct fixtures to harden individual features of parts like gear teeth. Consult with one of our experts to design a flame hardening process that can best meet your needs.

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Flame Hardening Capabilities at CST

Heating up steele with gas torchCincinnati Steel Treating designs a flame hardening process for a specific application. Large, long, and roughly symmetrical parts are most commonly flame-hardened using automatically set-up torch heads on a lathe. Small parts are usually flame hardened with hand held torches manned by a trained and

experienced operator. Special fixtures can be built for other small parts to fit the targeted surfaces that are designated to be heat treated. Ask one of our heat treat process engineers for a recommendation for the best set up for your application.

Flame Hardening Applications

calcining hot metal steel gear partsFlame hardening is the most versatile heat treatment performed in the commercial heat treat industry. There is no need for expensive coils or requirements to leave large amounts of stock or the need to purchase special baskets for fixturing. The most common materials that are flame hardened

include the medium carbon steels such as 1040, 1045, 4140, or 4340. Other more exotic materials like 52100, carburized steel, cast iron, or tool steels can also be flame hardened. CST has flame-hardened everything from rolls to bearing housings to spindles to knife blades. This experience gives CST an advantage in terms of figuring out how to best position and fixture parts that are going to be flame hardened to keep distortion to a minimum. CST also has the ability to correct distortion problems in our straightening department. Our heavy duty straightening press along with our inventory of special clamping tools enables us to fix a wide variety of distortion problems. CST can even perform hot straightening operations to correct large amounts of distortion on flame hardened parts.

Flame Hardening vs. Induction Hardening

Hardening Quench and TemperingFlame hardening and Induction Hardening are often compared with one another as options to perform surface heat treatments. There are many similarities between the two processes. Both localize heat in a specific area, both produce much less distortion compared with other heat treatments, and

both use much less energy when compared to heating the whole part to austenitizing temperature. The question is – when do you flame harden versus when do you induction harden? Flame hardening is usually the best option when the area of the part to be heat treated is in a difficult configuration. Such a situation makes it difficult to adapt an induction coil to the geometrical cross section of the part. Flame hardening is also the best option when there is a relatively small volume of parts that have to be heat treated. This is because the tooling for flame hardening is much less expensive compared with the tooling for induction hardening. CST is capable of both flame hardening and induction hardening in accordance with MIL-S-12515.  So ask one of our process engineers which is the best option for you.

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