DIECUT Engineering provides Metal Stress Relief and Hardening services for your profile cut, machined and fabricated jobs. Detailed information on the Metal Stress Relief and Flame Hardening processes can be found on the Blog.
Metal Stress Relief
Stress Relieving removes the residual stress introduced when metal is processed, for example during gas cutting, machining or welding. Stress relieving is typically used to prepare metals for further processing and as it also softens the metal it is often used before machining. Metal Stress Relief reduces the risk of metal distortion, cracking, and improves resistance to corrosive environments.
Metal Stress Relief involves heating the metal in an oven to a temperature just below the normalizing or annealing temperature and then letting the metal slowly cool to room temperature. While similar to Flame Hardening the maximum temperature and cooling rate are different.
For more information on Metal Stress Relief please see the Blog post on Metal Stress Relief.
Flame Hardening
Flame Hardening is used to improve the wear properties of metal components, for example metal sprockets and gears. To Flame Harden metal the component is heated heated in a furnace to its normalising or annealing temperature and then rapidly cooling (Quenched) in a suitable fluid like oil, water or air.
The Metal Stress Relief process can also be applied after Flame Hardening but the stress relief temperature is considerably lower than would otherwise be used to the hardening process is not reversed.
For more information on metal Flame Hardening see the Blog post of Flame Hardening.
This video shows an example of the Flame Hardening process