Alan J Hick, CHTA secretary, explains that entrusting heat treatments to specialist contractors enables engineering companies to: Reduce capital plant requirements; Release valuable space for more of their core activity; Avoid the cost of providing the highly-skilled supervision needed to manage today's sophisticated heat treatments; Achieve greater flexibility in selecting the best treatment for each job; Access new treatments and procedures immediately they become available, without capital cost.

The online buyers guide permits easy identification of contractors offering any of over 40 different heat treatment processes in the North, Midlands or South.

The site also makes available a series of downloadable 'Datasheets for Non-heat-treaters', which aid sensible specification of contract heat treatment and help to avoid common problems. The datasheets cover a wide range of processes including: stress relieving, normalising, annealing, hardening, tempering, carburising, carbonitriding, nitriding, nitrocarburising, and induction and flame hardening.

www.chta.co.uk