George Norton, general superintendent, manufacturing, describes a very unusual company and its use of polymer quenchants from Tenaxol to help produce, rapidly and flexibly, the tight metallurgical specs required in the oil patch.

Mr. Norton, we're here to ask some questions about the Earle M. Jorgensen Company's use of Tenaxol polymer quenchants, but would you mind first confirming or correcting an initial impression?
    Sure, What is it?

Is this the cleanest, most orderly steel and aluminum service center in the world?
    You noticed. I don't know if anyone in the Jorgensen organization has seen all the steel service centers in the world. As for me, I haven't yet seen all of the Jorgensen plants in 18 cities across the country, including Honolulu, so in truth I can't answer your question. I do know that here in Houston, cleanliness is a way of life and I've good reason to believe other Jorgensen locations are no different.

Why is that?
    It's just a way of life with us, and it affects everything . . . buildings, stock, equipment, trucks, offices, even the grass and shrubs. It makes you feel good. From a practical point of view, when things are clean and orderly it makes it easier to get the work done, and that translates into better quality and service, which is what it's all about. Jorgensen, however, is a very unusual company in several respects and I'd have to say that cleanliness and orderliness are just two of them.

Jorgensen apparently has a business philosophy that works.
    Jorgensen started out in a Los Angeles area bean field with a small tin shed for an office. We now have 22 facilities, some 1,500 employees, and sales around 300 million.

You said you were brought to Houston to help set up its heat treating operation. Can you give us a little background on this?
    Heat treating operations here were fired up in late spring of 1981, after being planned, engineered and installed over roughly a two-year period. Prior to that Houston bought steels heat treated to various specifications.

Why the change?
    Much of our business is with oil and gas firms. When the energy crunch hit, drillers started going deeper which meant tougher metallurgical specs which meant more heat treatment. Also, there were more of them, with varying requirements, so our need for flexibility increased.

Were you having problems with materials as supplied by traditional sources?
    Not materials per se. Our requirements -- our customers' requirements -- were simply outside the norms of prior facilities, quantities and delivery times for heat treated materials.

That's a pretty good statement to base some heat treatment questions on, which might get us into a few questions about your use of Tenaxol quenchants. First of all, how would you describe your heat treat facility?
    It's a batch operation employing two large-load, gas-fired, clamshell type furnaces with integrated quench and materials handling capability. The two furnaces are identical.

When you say large load, what are you talking about specifically? 
    Maximum load is rated at 35,000 pounds.

How about dimensions?
    Work pieces?

Yes.
    Most of what we heat treat is bars, more than 90 percent, and maximum length is 24 feet. In diameters we're talking a range between 4 inches and 19 inches with 10 inches being typical. Lengths usually run between 20 feet and the 24-foot maximum.

What else do you heat treat besides bars?
    For all practical purposes the rest is plate. There are odd pieces now and then, but a vast majority is bars and the rest plate.

You mentioned integrated quenching and materials handling.
    Yes. This building, the heat treating division, is relatively long and narrow. Without looking it up, it's roughly 400 feet long by 100 feet wide. The two furnaces are located side by side on one of the long walls, along with associated equipment. Green work and finished pieces are organized along the opposite wall. In between is a railtrack with a manipulator car capable of 30,000 pound loads that traverses the length of the building and which works in conjunction with a 20-ton crane that covers the whole area.

So in essence you have a crane serving a manipulator car serving furnaces?
    The crane, of course, also transfers material in and out of the building. 

You referred to the heat treating division as a building, yet it doesn't seem to be separate.
    Well, it is and it isn't. Jorgensen/Houston is a series of 10 buildings, side by side so that each building is really a bay, all served by a common truck and railway, and each devoted to a certain product or group of products and/or services.

What sorts of services?
    Oh, grinding, sawing, shearing and flame cutting come immediately to mind besides the heat treating.

How about fabrication?
    Jorgensen doesn't do fabrication. We'll do just about anything, including heat treating, to get a piece of steel ready to work with, but we leave fabrication to our customers.

What's the reasoning behind this?
    Somewhere along the line a company has to figure out what business it's in, and what Jorgensen does is get metal ready for someone else to use. It may be extreme, but if we were to fabricate most of a drilling rig I suppose ultimately the question would be why don't we drill for oil. We're a steel and aluminum supply center and devote our efforts to being the best of what we are.

Photo shows two tilt-top furnaces at Jorgensen's Houston service center. Manipulator car, positioned over quench tank of open furnace, also serves near furnace.

Heat treating obviously fits the metal preparation concept, and quenching is where the action takes place, so to speak, in heat treating. How are you set up for quenching?
    Each furnace has its own 45,000-gallon quench tank. One holds water, the other Tenaxol's polymer formulation. Agitation is provided by five 30-horsepower variable speed motors per tank, each driving a 24-inch propeller. The system enables us to turn over the quench, totally, in five to six seconds.

Have you done anything special in relation to quenchant flow control?
    Yes. We wanted uniform upflow across the tank so we designed a series of baffles across the bottom. The pumps drive the quench down the long side and across the bottom where the baffles, smaller near the pump side, larger at the rear, deflect the quench upward. Uniformity is really quite remarkable.

Tenaxol's lab people say the quench samples you submit for analysis haven't varied from norm for nearly two years now. What's the secret of your success?
    No secret at all, really. Just diligence related to proper procedures.

You have a sophisticated metallurgical lab here, yet you faithfully utilize Tenaxol's quench bath analysis service. How come?
    We'd be silly not to. Their perspective comes from analysis of hundreds of quench baths. We could run our own analysis and occasionally do, but it's mostly to see how the two analyses match up. To us, using Tenaxol's service is a form of insurance. Furthermore, it's free.

Overview of heat treating division shows work storage at right and furnace line at left. Tnlaxol polymer is used in one of two 45,000-gallon quench tanks.

What are some of the things you do to make your quench so uniform?
    Maybe it's less what we do than what we did when we designed this facility. Groundwater in the Southwest, for example, is notorious for its mineral content. So we take city water and retreat it before using it in the quench, using apparatus installed at the beginning.

What's the treatment?
    First we run city water through a standard commercial grade water softener. Then we pump it through a reverse osmosis unit with two fabric filters, and from there it goes to a 2,000-gallon storage tank. By the time it gets there everything down to five microns has been removed.

Why the storage tank?
    For availability. It takes 24 hours to pump 2,000 gallons through the filters.

Do you have to change filters very often?
    About every three weeks.

Do you consider that expensive?
    No we don't. At Jorgensen, quality is equated with economy. It's always less costly to do something right the first time. Another example is the doors over the quench tanks. When the tanks are not being used, we push a button and hinged doors roll up and over the tanks. Purpose, of course, is to keep out contaminants.

What about the contaminants that come off the steel during heat treatment?
    All we can do is minimize them, first by working with clean material, which means all material is stored under roof. Then during heat cycling, we keep a positive pressure of maybe two inches water column in the furnace which tends to keep scale loose but on the work due to minimum oxygen.

What happens to the scale that does come off during quenching?
    It settles to the bottom of the tank where a series of high velocity jets flushes it to a holding pit at one end. The pit is emptied as a matter of scheduled maintenance.

You said you had Tenaxol's polymer quenchant in one tank and water in the other.
    That's for versatility. The materials we heat treat generally range from 4130 to 4140, 41 and 42 plus some stainless. Earlier, in round numbers, it was about 50-50 between 4130 and 4142, but these days it's nearly all 4142.

Which means the Tenaxol formulation is getting all the action?
    Nearly all. Keep in mind we can quench in one tank from both furnaces, so we're not losing anything by keeping water in the one. Switching it to polymer would be a simple matter of adding polymer.

What can you tell us about your quality control here?
    For material?

Right.
    Nearly all the heat treating we do is to customer specification, and we deal with some very knowledgeable people. Every piece we heat treat is first untrasonically tested. No point in heat treating a faulty piece. I should interject here that the number of faulty pieces is extremely small. After heat treatment we test for tensiles, Charpy impacts and Brinells. If there's any straightening to be done, that comes next. We do have a 1000-ton straightening press and I'm happy to say it doesn't get much work.

Mr. Norton, what can you say, for the record, about Tenaxol generally?
    People or products?

Both. Products first.
    At Jorgensen, metallurgy comes first, and Tenaxol quenchants are first-rate. If they weren't we wouldn't use them. We appreciate the lack of fire hazard, smoke, pollution apparatus and all that, but they're bonuses.

People?
    Tenaxol people are invariably competent, not only in relation to their own products, but to the quenching process generally. Let me ask you something. If I had anything negative to say about Tenanol, would you print it?

We would now, we have in the past, and we will in the future. Nobody's perfect.