Q&A with Guido Locatelli

Vice GM of TAV Vacuum Furnaces SPA; president of Furnacare Inc., a TAV Group company

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Tell us about your company.
The company was established in 1984 near Milan, Italy, in the city of Caravaggio, and since its inception the headquarters and plant have grown year over year. Flexibility, technology, and quality: These core values have been driving the company since 1984, making our company one of the most important players in the market of vacuum furnace engineering and manufacturing. Through the established trust obtained from small- and large-sized companies on the international scene, coupled with our core values, the company continues to gain market share.

This result has been achieved through our president, Giuseppe Tonini’s tenacity and entrepreneurship, the company’s high-engineering specialization, innovative design, and a customized production focused on the client’s needs and high quality.

What strengths does your company have?
Thanks to the company’s wide know-how in vacuum engineering, we provide our customers with a team of professionals who can manage and solve all issues, ranging from design to manufacturing, project management, installation, consultative technical support, training, and technical service. The R&D department in TAV Vacuum Furnaces is constantly working to ensure a tailor-made product according to customer needs, with regard toward innovative technologies.

Each furnace is designed according to specifications and meets the strictest criteria and procedures to ensure compliance with the most stringent international industry specifications.

What product and services does your company offer?
We design and manufacture customized advanced vacuum furnaces in a wide range of geometries and dimensions that are used in the heat treatment of steels, alloys, superalloys, advanced ceramic materials in hardening, tempering, solubilization, annealing, brazing, and sintering operations.

We support these processes mainly in the following fields: production of heat exchangers, aviation/aerospace, automotive, IGT (industrial gas turbine) industry, heat treatment of additive manufactured parts, commercial heat treatment, component sintering industry (medical, precision mechanics, optics,) and R&D laboratories.

We produce cart door horizontal vacuum furnaces for applications that require higher repeatability and reproducibility of the results. It is the cost-effective solution for large, dense loads, perfectly suitable to move massive loads up to 10,000-plus pounds with maximum safety.

The hinged-door horizontal vacuum furnace is the best solution to meet heat-treating needs in the various fields of vacuum application. Whatever speed, compactness, precision, and reliability are required, this vacuum furnace solution provides customers with the most suitable answer in terms of automation and operational flexibility. The constant deep-rooted dedication to innovation has driven TAV Vacuum Furnaces to work out solutions meeting all customer needs, becoming one of the few vacuum furnace suppliers to manufacture vertical furnaces for vacuum heat treatment, vacuum brazing, advanced ceramics, and UHV (Ultra High Vacuum) applications.

We also offer a highly qualified after-sales service that includes customer staff training, maintenance programs, remote troubleshooting with state-of-the-art computer analysis techniques, and consumables/spare parts supply. Since 2015, in order to enhance our relationship with the North America market, we established Furnacare Inc. in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

How did you get involved in Furnacare?
After a long experience in TAV Vacuum Furnaces, I joined Furnacare, becoming its president.

As Furnacare here in North America, we continue to grow our engineering, technical, and commercial staff, working to communicate to the market the high quality of the TAV Vacuum Furnaces coupled with the ability to reduce the customers cost and maximize efficiencies through delivering proven premium quality manufactured solutions that are durable, customized, and technologically advanced to carry our customers forward.

We take care of the maintenance throughout the entire life cycle of the furnaces. Our aim is to facilitate the work of your engineers, operators, and maintenance team to have your furnaces always operative in the production process with top performance.

Our core service competencies include hot-zone refurbishment and replacement, repairs, spare parts, upgrades, TUS, SAT, calibrations, leak detection, preventive maintenance programs, new vacuum furnaces installations, and new vacuum furnaces sales.

More infowww.tav-vacuumfurnaces.com, www.furna.care