Wallwork Heat Treatment (WHT) has invested more than £500,000 in a new vacuum furnace to process critical flying parts, such as landing gear components and flying control parts, at its Bury site.

The new furnace will take components with an envelope size of up to 1500mm by 900mm by 800mm, and a weight capacity of 1.6 tonnes. This makes it suitable for a wide selection of aerospace parts, including turbine blades, engine rings, fuel injection components, and bulk critical treatments of fasteners. Both Argon and Nitrogen inert gas treatment and quenching systems are available for titanium and other high alloys, including highly stressed steels.

"This investment marks another major extension of our aerospace capacity," commented WHT Director Peter Carpenter. "It gives around a 30 per cent gain in capacity here, and significantly extends our ability to process larger flying parts as 'single unitary' components."

The new furnace is fully equipped for critical treatments, including stress relieving for titanium, tempering for aerospace grade stainless steels, and solution treatments for advanced high alloys, such as Inconel.

These services are part of a comprehensive range of energy efficient, environmentally friendly, vacuum-based processes. Other treatments available include carburising, case hardening, nitriding, tempering, annealing, normalising, and other metallurgical technologies, including sub-zero treatments and Tufftride® treatments. A comprehensive technical service on site provides laboratory facilities and an extended range of analytical processes to provide a problem solving and process enhancement and optimisation service.

Wallwork Heat Treatment is now a substantial supplier in the aerospace engineering sector, with NADCAP approval for both high performance coatings and many types of aerospace heat treatments. Other approvals include Airbus, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Hawker Beechcraft, and Goodrich Engine Control Systems.