Social media is the craze these days. The question is, “Is it relevant to the thermal-processing industry?”

If you had to choose, which would you take: low energy prices or higher, stable energy prices? The answer, believe it or not, is not unanimous.

About 15% of Industrial Heating subscribers are from the commercial (or as they call it in Europe, the “contract”) heat-treat industry. The other 85% are mostly captive/in-house heat treaters like Boeing, Ford and Black & Decker, or industry suppliers (typically less than 10%).

A search for "hot oil" (which I'm NOT recommending) using an Internet search engine like Google or Mamma, will yield more information than you want and not much of it will relate to quench oils!

AUTOMOTIVE FOCUS : Induction Heat Treating
In the highly competitive automotive heat-treating market, keeping current is a competitive advantage. Based on a plant tour and interviews with key personnel at Induction Heat Treating Corp. (www.ihtcorp.com), Crystal Lake, Ill., the following article discusses three ideas where upgrades and advances in technology, equipment, and processes have helped the company produce high-quality induction heat-treated parts.

History is a wonderful thing and Industrial Heating has had the enormous blessing of chronicling much of the metals industry's history over the past 75 years. Whether you are a history buff or not, several hours spent leafing through Industrial Heating's archives is worthwhile. Anyone reading this editorial is welcome to do just that - come and visit our offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and look through our archives starting back as far as 1924.

On May 9-10, you can get a quick and profitable education about many of the latest sensors and control systems at Furnace Controls & Sensors 2006 Conference being held in Schaumburg, Ill., at the Hyatt Regency Woodfield. With support from the industry's leading sensor and controls suppliers like Yokogawa, Air Products, Eurotherm, Siemens, Super Systems Inc., Honeywell, Waukee, and a host of others, Industrial Heating is sponsoring this state-of-the-art conference to give your company the opportunity to learn about and fully utilize all the advances available.

There are about 23,000 of you that receive Industrial Heating every month, and roughly 150 of you volunteered to tell us your spending plans for 2006. Extrapolating from these responses, the industrial heating market will spend nearly $7.5 billion for equipment, components, and supplies in 2006.

New to the game is the Metal Treating Institute (MTI) (www.heattreatonline.com). MTI's new Online Academy at www.MTIAcademy.com is offering an attractive alternative for training and educating employees which has several substantial advantages.

Oil company executives recently made another trip to Washington to justify their higher-than-normal profits. Oh that we all had to make that trip! It should strike us all as rather odd that profit-making is suspect and that those who do it well are the lead suspects.