Custom machines

Designed around your part

You can buy an induction power supply off a shelf. You cannot buy a machine that hardens your axle shaft, because the coil has to fit your shaft, the traverse has to cover your hardened length, the quench has to suit your steel and the handling has to match your rate.

We quote against your component and production requirements. A drawing helps us define the coil, heating cycle, handling and cooling before we recommend a complete machine.

The six things that determine the machine

1. The component. Geometry, mass, and which features matter. A drawing settles in one page what a paragraph of description will not.
2. The material. Grade and prior condition. C45 and EN31 behave differently, and a normalised part and a quenched-and-tempered one of the same grade behave differently again.
3. The treated zone. Which surface, over what length, and equally importantly what must stay soft: threads, splines, machined faces, welds.
4. The specification. Case depth or target temperature, surface hardness, the tolerances on both, and the standard they are measured against.
5. The rate. Parts per hour the line must sustain, not a peak figure. This sets power, station count and how much handling is worth automating.
6. The context. What happens before and after, available floor space, supply voltage and phases, cooling water availability, and whether tempering is in scope.

What gets designed

Six answers produce a machine with these parts, all of them decisions rather than selections:

• Power supply rating and frequency band, from the mass, the temperature rise, the rate and the required depth.
• The inductor, wound to the component, with its cooling and its mounting.
• The quench arrangement, its geometry, timing and medium.
• Handling: how the part is located, held, rotated and traversed, and how it arrives and leaves.
• Control: manual, PLC or CNC, with the interlocks and the stored programs.
• Cooling: the DM water circuit for the coil and electronics, a chiller if the duty needs one, and the separate quench circuit.
• Guarding and safety, which on a machine that heats steel to 900 degrees Celsius and sprays quenchant is not an afterthought.

Machines built this way

Examples of machines we have built around specific components:

• A double station sledge hammer head hardening machine. Two stations because operator load time, not heating time, was the cycle.
• A flywheel ring hardening cell at 120 kW, hardening a starter ring gear around its full circumference.
• A CI ring and bush dual heating machine that brings a ring and its bush to temperature together, in one operation, under closed loop temperature control.
• A PLC based rotary induction bonding machine, indexing parts through load, heat, dwell and unload.
• An axle shaft hardening machine on a 50 kW supply with a vertical scanner.
• A horizontal hardening machine carrying several inductors in line, for parts that will not hang true.

We can discuss these approaches as a starting point for your component, then develop the configuration around your requirements.