Anything that’s manufactured and sold to the public goes through a rigorous testing process before it can be legally sold. This is done to ensure quality, safeness and all of the other variables that are meant to protect people from buying in to a product that might not live up to their expectations or worse, put them in danger. And, when it comes to metallurgical services in Gastonia, NC, the process is no different.
Before any product can be heat treated and returned to a client or before any products can be manufactured for sale, testing needs to be done in order to confirm that the hardness, toughness and other physical properties of a product live up to the expectations that are set down for them.
This is where a dummy comes in. No, we’re not talking about crash test dummies or anything like that—we’re simply talking about a piece of metal that’s roughly the size, shape and consistency of the product(s) that’s going to be heat treated for the purpose of resale. This dummy acts as, well, a dummy, to give a metallurgist insight into how the actual product is going to react to metallurgical services in Gastonia, NC.
Dummies are especially useful in vacuum heat treatment settings. Dummies will show the different temperatures of the metal through the various stages of heating and allow metallurgical professionals to track the history of the heat treatments they’re performing to make sure that every step is coming out accurately and to the right level of quality.
Now, dummies aren’t the only way to track heat and changes in an alloy, but they are among the most reliable. Because the dummy itself is being exposed to the same conditions that the eventual product will be, it provides firsthand evidence of the changes that are being affected and assures the metallurgist that everything is going according to plan.
Perhaps the best part about a dummy is that in the event something goes wrong and the right settings were not configured for a heat treatment, there is no harm done to anything other than the dummy! And because dummies are simply a hunk of scrap that shares properties with the actual product, it can quickly be disposed of or even reused in other tests that require the properties that the dummy is now saddled with.
Dummies are part of the quality control process for a variety of metallurgical services in Gastonia, NC and play a very important role in helping metallurgists live up to the expectations that are set down for them—not to mention saving time by eliminating mistakes and saving money by ensuring that nothing goes amiss with a batch of products!
As it turns out, using a dummy is just about the smartest thing a metallurgist can do and thanks to the foresight that one provides, we’re able to make safe, quality, effective market-ready metal products that live up to the application that they’re designed for,