Marquenching / Quenching / Martempering Heat Treatment

Marquenching–also referred to as martempering–is an excellent tool for reducing distortion in components requiring hardening. Most conventional hardening operations involve heating components to temperatures above their austenitizing temperature and the quenching into agitated baths of oil, water, or polymer with oil quenching being the most common media.

Marquenching involves heating components to the same austenitizing temperatures, but then quenching into a hot media such as molten saltbaths or specialized hot oil quenches held at higher temperatures such as 225F–275F for oil quenching or 300F–400F for salt quenching.

Reduce Distortion in Metal Parts 

These higher quench media temperatures allow for more uniform and slower cooling of parts as they are quenched. It also allows for the transformations that occur during hardening to take place more uniformly as the surface and core of a part are transformed at the same time rather than allowing thin sections or surfaces to transform prior to thicker sections or the core which cool slower.

Marquenching is often employed to harden thin, long shafts or thin stampings to keep these parts straighter or flatter than what would be possible in a conventional cold oil quench.

Marquenching can be employed to eliminate costly, time-consuming secondary operations such as clamp tempering or straightening.

Many long and thin components such as stampings, punches, pins, shafts, lawn mower blades, crankshafts, and bearings cannot be hardened using conventional quenches and still maintain their required dimensional tolerances which drive the need for marquenching processes to be employed.