Customer Reviews

Practical Heat Treating (06518G)

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This book is a very useful tool to get the laymen use of heat treating applications and equipment.I had this book since 1988 and have refered to it on numberous occasions.If you are entering the heat treat field this book will give you more of the every day terms, definitions, needed on the shop floor. If your job envolves engineering, machining, or other metal fabrication this book will help you uderstand the the heat treat process. It may also help in the decision of metal which best meets your needs. Jerry Vincent

Here again, nobody needs to worry about being run over by the Pulitzer Prize van. This book is published by the organization that the guy is, to say the least, a key player in. (One thing that struck me was the frequent use of "affect" when "effect" was called for.) Pragmatically, I'm very irked that after reading this entire book on heat treating, where steel is the metal to which this is most relevant, I still have almost no idea what bainite is (you austemper when the bainite microstructure will suit you), and I'm not even sure I understand well what martensite is (although I know that it's hard and you get it if you quench fast enough). The guy shows some lovely 1,000x photomicrographs of etched steel, showing the microstructure, but he's not thorough. I'm offended by this book, but glad to own it, and if you can afford it you should pick it up too. You just don't seem to find well-written books on these exotic specialties.

(Added later) I think this is one of those so-common situations where shoddy thinking wins the race, because you can produce the stuff faster (if you're willing to). If you are only going to buy one book, make it the Machinery's Handbook. I just dug into mine, and the section on heat treating is magnificent (not shoddy), also quite extensive. In particular, the questions I complained about above were thoroughly, clearly answered in the Handbook.