Vacuum Furnaces

[richie00boy]

Anybody know anything about industrial vacuum furnaces? I have a friend whose family run an industrial vacuum furnace company abroad and are looking to bring their products to the UK. Is there much call for these over here?

 

[bill_gj]

Industrial vacuum furnaces - used for mass production of aluminium car radiators, a/c heat exchangers, quality pipe assemblies at one end of the spectrum, down to one-offs for the aero industry in exotic nimonic materials at the other end.

Automotive products are what the industry classes as 'commodities' in the UK and there is little profit made from them owing to lots of competition. I know that the sort of kit required for car rads/heater exchangers costs millions (~£5M) to set up with new machines from scratch.
There's a demand in F1 for products needing this sort of process, with small volume and higher profit margins and I would imagine that there is still a small amount of aerospace production but you may need to be in the right part of the country for that (Bristol, Derby, North East).

 

[richie00boy]

Thanks for the information, all good. My friend says their equipment is more advanced/better yet cheaper than most of the competition, so maybe the setup cost is not as great. But I think they have just looked at what is available in the USA so far - maybe in Europe things are different?

As it happens Gloucester is about an hour from Bristol, and Derby is not that far really, couple of hours.

Are there trade shows for this kind of thing? Otherwise I guess it's a case of going round companies almost cold calling?

 

[bill_gj]

A few events I found:

http://www.subconshow.co.uk/
http://www.machexhibition.com/
http://aeroconf.com/
http://ukautoengineering.com/
https://www.reedexpo.com/en/Events/3328/FC-EXPO

 

[daleyd]

I work for a company called Eurotherm and we supply control systems for furnaces amongst other things. Aerospace is difficult to get into because of the regulations involved. There are VERY stringent requirements for this industry involving permitted thermocouple types, calibration schedules, traceability, recording of data etc.

I suspect if they are cheap or have some other unique quality then you may get some business, but the uk is generally well served with existing furnace suppliers/ manufacturers. (I should point out I am not really involved in sales as such, I am a service engineer)

Depends what sort of size they are as well, smaller ones could be supplied to universities, hospitals etc larger ones will generally be used in manufacturing.

When you say more advanced, vacuum furnaces are not generally complicated pieces of equipment in the first place. Anything sold in the uk will generally need to be ce certified, and obviously customers will want to know about service support if things go wrong, spares availability, calibration procedures etc

It seems a limited market to me, but if the product is good then there should be no reason it wouldn't sell. Good luck!

 

[Robotstar5]

I work for a company called Eurotherm and we supply control systems for furnaces amongst other things.

I did a course on Eurotherm controllers, used a lot of them for the ovens in Land Rovers paintshop.

 

[daleyd]

One of our guys is doing a project for jag at the moment with some of our bigger controllers. I was a bit gutted - I fancied going to perv at some nice cars myself

 

[richie00boy]

Thanks for all the help, much appreciated.