Manufacturers with in-house heat-treating departments looking for custom-engineered furnace systems or standard heat-treat furnaces as well as commercial heat treaters looking for the latest technology to save time and money have a friend in SECO/WARWICK Corp. of Meadville, Pa.

The company has one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the North American thermal-processing industry and one of the most experienced and progressive engineering and manufacturing teams available.

“Our company has developed several innovative technology solutions that can save our customers time and money,” said North American Managing Director Jonathan Markley, who has been at the corporate helm for just over two years.

Markley has brought an aggressive and progressive attitude to Meadville. “We believe it’s important to be extremely responsive to our customers’ needs. We have been focused on overhauling our business systems to better enable our teams to react quickly when customers call,” Markley said.

The company’s 110,000-square-foot manufacturing facility is more than ample to handle the large number of furnace orders that are processed through the facility annually. Employing between 80 and 100 individuals from the local community and pulling in talent from across the country, the company builds an extremely wide variety of thermal-processing equipment.

The company divides its product offering into four broad categories:

• Thermal is the broadest category of furnaces, capturing everything from long roller-hearth, mesh or cast link belt and pusher furnaces to the more standard box, pit, bell and integral-quench furnaces.
• Aluminum furnaces for melting and holding as well as typical aluminum processing furnaces for annealing, homogenizing, aging and solution heat treating.

• Furnaces for heat exchanger brazing, or what is called the controlled atmosphere brazing (CAB) line of equipment.
• Vacuum furnaces for a wide variety of processes and industries, including aerospace, medical, automotive and energy.

The longtime MTI member has shipped hundreds of industrial thermal-processing furnaces all over the globe, many of which are still operating today. As one of several sister companies in the SECO/WARWICK Group, the North American company is able to leverage a global pool of technology and production know-how for the benefit of local customers.

While the company has one of the richest histories in the industry, it prefers to look to the future. “We’re pushing forward; we’re developing new technologies; and we’re not resting on past accomplishments,” asserted Markley.

That seems to be evident by several of the company’s new technologies. Maciej Korecki, global vice president of the vacuum furnace line of products, and his team have developed a truly continuous vacuum carburizing furnace that debuted at Thermprocess in June 2015. This case hardening equipment can process up to 1 million gears a year and appears to eliminate all the negative, but widely accepted, shortcomings of batch processing. The company has also worked closely with scientists to develop a nitriding process that essentially cuts the consumption of ammonia and nitrogen to near-zero levels.

SECO/WARWICK appears to be on an aggressive upward trend, and the North American team is excited about the future.