Is Heat Treating used to change the chemical properties of fasteners?

The Fastener Training Minute is a co-production of The FCH Sourcing Network and The Fastener Training Institute and is presented by Carmen Vertullo of the Carver FACT Center and the AIM Test Lab in San Diego, California.

Originally published on Fully Threaded Radio, Episode 146, 11/15/2019

Some of you might know that the faster training institute has one of their infamous or famous, depending upon which side you're on, Certified Fastener Specialist week-long training programs coming up in La Mirada, California the first week of December 2019, and I hope you'll attend that class.

But I wanted to tell you something about how we start off the program on the first day of the class after we introduce each other and the students and instructors get to know each other a little bit.

We give an introductory quiz. The quiz consists of a sheet of paper with twenty statements on it about Fasteners. These are statements not questions and the answers are true false and don't know.

And don't know means don't guess so we ask the students to quickly fill this thing out and take a break. And when they come back, we go around the room and each student gets to pick a question and answer it true false don't know. And then we argue about the answer.

Some of those questions are like this for example:
Stainless steel is never magnetic
In a fastener joint the nut should be stronger than the bolt.
ISO standards apply mostly to Quality Management Systems.
Metric Fasteners require less torque than inch Fasteners
and so on.

Well, I'm going to pick one of those questions at random and we're going to discuss it.

We are going to discuss one of the questions on the certified Fastener specialist program introductory quiz, so I'm going to spin the wheel and see which question comes up.

Number 8 Is Heat Treating used to change the chemical composition of fasteners, true false or don't know.

The answer to "is Heat Treating used to change the chemical composition of fasteners" is false.

Heat Treating cannot change the chemistry of a metal. The chemistry of the metal is made when it comes out of the mill.

The metal gets all melted together, and then later it gets poured and that's the chemistry forever for that particular metal or the Fastener it's made from.

That's one of the reasons why we can rely on the mill test report for the chemistry of a particular fastener.

Next time, we'll discuss another question on the quiz, which is the following question: is Heat Treating used to change the physical properties of fasteners.