Heat Treat Report

The Monty, April 2005 Issue

As you’re probably aware from time to time we sum up commercial and captive heat treating in different geographic regions around the world, for today we’re talking about Ontario, Canada a reasonably good size heat treating area. First and foremost Ontario is the automotive capital of North America (at least in terms of vehicles assembled). So what this means is while Ontario has a wide range of requirements for heat treating, automotive is far and away the largest.

On the commercial side we have the two big boys on the block, Bodycote International with 2 plants and Gibraltar with 1 facility, B & W Heat Treating. Don’t think for a second though that these two have the lion’s share of the market. Other notables are H & S Heat Treating (large volume continuous work, batch), Metex Heat Treating (large volume fastener work), Vac Aero (vacuum heat treating, largely aerospace), A & M Heat Treating (a full service shop which includes vacuum, continuous, batch, Ion and Gas Nitriding), Cambridge HT (Batch and vacuum mainly), Allied HT (mainly vacuum) and at least a dozen others. And how are the commercials doing? Good. At least a few are adding capacity and most seem to have pretty fancy new vehicles out front which is always a fairly good indication about how things are going. One interesting note is that commercials in Ontario generally specialize in a certain process, B & W in aluminum, Metex, continuous mesh belt, Vac Aero aerospace vacuum are three examples that come to mind.

On the captive side in spite of the large amount of automotive work none of the auto makers do much in the way of heat treating except for GM and even their facility in St. Catherines, Ontario is just a shadow of it’s former self. Beyond that Ontario has fastener guys (at least two large ones), bearing manufacturers (several), powdered metal facilities (at least 4), automotive transmission components plants (of which Linamar Machine does the most heat treating), auto components plants (Arvin Meritor and TRW both come to mind) and the other usual mish mash of companies doing some heat treating in house.

All in all Ontario pretty much covers the bases and while I don’t know the exact figures Ontario certainly ranks amongst the top few States/Provinces in North America in terms of the amount of heat treating. The big question these days is will the rising Canadian dollar put the brakes on manufacturing and consequently heat treating in Ontario? My feeling is that it will slow it down but that’s about it and seeing the capacity being added is a good indication that I’m not alone in my thinking. March 28/05