Heat Treatment of Metal Pressings

The most critical element of a spring steel metal pressings is the careful control of the heat treatment process.

Baker & Finnemore's UK Pressings have heat-treated spring steel pressings for over 150 years and continue to maintain this process as an "in-house" facility. In excess of more than 300 million components a year are processed through our modern austempering plant.

Austempering is considered to be superior to the conventional hardening and tempering process. Austempering offers significant improvements inductility, hardness and toughness when compared with oil hardened and tempering.

Austempering is an Isothermal transformation in hot salt to form bainite, where as the conventional hardening and tempering process is a rapid oil quench followed by tempering, to produce tempered martinsite.

Baker & Finnemore's heat treatment furnaces are fully automatic continuous lines which are strictly controlled and monitored to ensure maximum quality and consistency.