Rapid New Product Development
Heat Treating
The situation is all too familiar for aerospace industry manufacturers and suppliers: When new product development periods ramp up, the backlog of orders at many heat treatment facilities builds, pushing development periods and timelines out by months.
Finding a solution to this problem can be vexing. Often, aerospace manufacturers either search for a heat treatment facility with larger capacity, or accede to longer timelines. For the benefit of our clients, Jones Metal Products has developed a rapid new-product development process that keeps projects on schedule, even through multiple product iterations.
While we are known for our hydroforming, deep draw stamping, fluid cell forming and other metal forming capabilities, we’ve also developed heat treatment services for a wide range of industries and applications.
For example, our two drop-bottom furnaces provide solution heat treating, aging and partial and full annealing for aluminum metals. With these furnaces, we offer stress relieving with polymer solution, water, and air quenching options. For ferrous metals, such as steel, brass, bronze and titanium alloys, we offer our vacuum heat treatment service. All of our heat treating furnaces and ovens are maintained and continuously tested to achieve precise temperature control, ensuring that parts are always heat treated to specifications.
On the other end of the spectrum, we also utilize a Cincinnati SubZero freezer. This cryogenic unit preserves heat-treated materials at a specified state of softness so that they can be delivered just in time for further processing. This capability improves work flow and scheduling and provides operational flexibility.
Our investment in heat treatment equipment and expertise enables customers to consolidate their metal forming and heat treatment jobs with one shop, cutting the time it takes to move projects to completion. And because we recognize just how important our clients’ development timelines are, we’ve put in place internal methodology and operations that enable precise heat treatment timing. This ensures that, throughout the prototyping and development process, we can deliver an ISO 9001 and NADCAP certified heat-treating service when it is time for a part to be heat treated. With this process, unnecessary time lags are eliminated so that unscheduled weeks are not added to the development timeline for every prototype or product change. In fact, most heat treatment jobs handled by Jones Metal are turned around in just one week’s time.
From aluminum and stainless steel to exotic metals, we have the heat treating equipment and expertise to ensure that the new product development process is completed on spec, on time and on budget.
If your business – whether it’s aerospace to automotive, commercial lighting to cookware – is planning for a new development project, contact us to learn how we can help you stay on schedule.
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