HANSEN-BALK TOUR

Heat treating of materials is their fame, Hansen-Balk is their name. Hansen-Balk has been in business for 42 years. Their capabilities range from heat treating of all tool steels and stainless steel treating, to both high speed and high alloy steel treating. They also do carburizing, flame hardening, stress relieving, and atmosphere annealing and hardening.

One very interesting process that Hansen-Balk performs is ionitriding. This process consists of electrically charging hydrogen and ammonia particles which react with surface of the material. By heating the materials to a temperature of 900°F for about 15 hours, a very high wear resistant surface is achieved. The material hardness ranged from 65-70 Rockwell C. Lastly, this process allows areas to be masked off, which then allow the customer to complete some machining on those areas.

Hansen-Balk also owns a large number of vacuum hardening and vacuum tempering ovens. The temperatures of these ovens can be held very consistent, usually within a tolerance of 5-8°. This allows for very consistent and reliable material hardening abilities. The vacuum is created in the ovens, by pumping the atmosphere out, and pumping in a nitrogen gas based atmosphere. This process creates very clean material surfaces upon completion, with virtually no scaling.

During our visit of Hansen-Bulk, we learned that the majority of quenching operations are performed in oil. However, an alternative is a liquid salt quench, which is more suitable than oil in some cases. Also, in the ovens, Hansen-Balk is able to quench using nitrogen. This process is slower than water and oil quenching, but it is done as fast as possible with ruining the grain structure.

Overall, Hansen-Balk appeared to be a very progressive company. Nearly all their heat treating equipment was computer controlled. Furthermore, some of the computer controlled ovens were equiped such that operators would be alerted in the case of a temperature malfunction. Also, we learned that Hansen-Balk is dealing with certain parameters which their customers are requiring them to meet. Hansen-Balk appeared to be very proactive in meeting these requirements, which puts them one more step ahead.