Heat Treatment

Book excerpt: This book focuses on heat-treating by ASM, SME, and AISI standards. The manual has been created for use in student education, as well as to guide professionals who has been heat treating their entire lives. It is written without the typical metallurgical jargon. This book will serve as a training manual from day one in learning how to heat treat a metal, and then also serve as a day to day reference for a lifetime. This manual zeros in on the popular tool steels, alloy steels, heat-treatable stainless steels, case hardening steels, and more. It deals with these metals with up-to-date usage and processing recipes. What is different with this manual from all the others is that it doesn't just deal with the heat-treatment process, it also covers the continuation of the hardening process with cryogenics. Yes, it is written to help those who may want a thorough understanding of what goes on in the process of heat-treating, and how to do it better. However, it also shows how proper heat and cryogenic processing can save your company money. Making money through longer life tooling, decarb-free and stress relief, all while learning how to create a better, finer grain structure. This manual shows the reader that hardness is only an indication of hardness, and that the real money savings is in the fine grained structure. This manual is written for toolmakers, engineers, heat-treaters, procurement, management personnel, and anyone else who is involved in metals. Metals are affected by the entire thermal scale from 2400�F, down to -320�F. That is the complete range of thermally treated metals and that is what this manual covers.