If you’re starting a business, you need the proper tools to create your products or provide your services, especially in manufacturing. What tools you’ll require will depend on what products you make or services you hope to provide. You might need industrial ovens in several different industries. They are heating chambers that you can use to bake, dry, and cure all kinds of items.
In this article, we’ll run through a few things that you can do with industrial ovens. If you plan on getting into various niches, you might find yourself industrial oven shopping before too long. We’ll also give you some tips for when you’re ready to buy this essential equipment.
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Heat Treating Materials
You might find yourself needing to purchase or upgrade an industrial oven if you need to heat treat materials for your business. When you heat treat something, usually metal, you apply heat to it so that you get the desired effect.
You can anneal something this way, or you can accomplish aging, tempering, or stress relief. You can set the industrial oven to a particular temperature, and you can heat treat many metal components at once, especially if you have a larger model.
When you temper metal components, you lessen the hardened metal’s brittleness. You’re trying to get the right balance of hardness and ductility.
Stress relief, meanwhile, occurs when you apply heat to relieve thermal stresses, as well as residual or structural ones. You can utilize an industrial oven if you want to accomplish either of these things.
Sintering
You can use industrial ovens for sintering. This is the process where you bond and compact without reaching the material’s melting point.
When you do this, the material increases strength, and it also gains density. If you’re getting into the metallurgy business, you’ll want ovens for this reason.
You might also use ovens for sintering if you’re making certain dental tools. You might use them if you’re doing metal injection molding. When you start talking about sintering, what you mean is pre-heating, the cool-down process, and high heat operations.
Drying Materials
You might use an industrial oven if you’re going to get into the pharmaceutical game. Maybe you have a new drug that’s about to hit the market.
Drugs that you mass-manufacture start as a slurry of the required ingredients. You might have a vat of the slurry going at one point, and then you portion it out into pills. From there, the pills will go into an industrial oven. You’re curing the pills, so they retain their integrity.
However, you might also use these ovens to sterilize lab equipment. That equipment must be sterile because surgeons could use it to operate, or doctors could use it to examine patients with an immunocompromised condition.
This isn’t the only way you can use an industrial oven if you’re getting into pharmaceuticals, though. You can also use them to burn off excess waste and chemicals. Often, the pill-making process creates those, and you need to eliminate them rather than dumping the toxic material somewhere it might harm the environment.
Burn-In Testing Materials
You might use industrial ovens to burn-in testing materials. You can either do static or dynamic material burn-ins if you have integrated circuits, such as if you’re making circuit boards.
You might also use them with some electronic devices. Laser diodes often need to go through a burn-in testing process. You might send those lasers to medical offices. The doctors can use the lasers for Lasix eye surgery and other functions.
Sterilization
Many industries require industrial ovens because they need to put equipment they’re producing through a meticulous sterilization process. You might make syringes for doctor’s offices and hospitals. You can sterilize them in an oven.
You might make scissors or scalpels. You might fashion metal rods or staples. You need to sterilize all of those. If you don’t, they can infect a patient during a delicate procedure, and that can lead to medical malpractice lawsuits.
Procuring the Right Industrial Ovens
If you find that you’re getting into the automotive or pharmaceutical industries, doing something oil and gas related, or even if you’re getting into electronics or food production, you’re probably going to need industrial ovens. Since so many different industries require them, you’ll also find several companies that manufacture them.
It probably won’t surprise you that industrial ovens can be quite costly. The cheapest ones might be only $3,500 or so, but the enormous, high-end ones can set you back as much as $20,000.
However, you can also sometimes find companies that refurbish them and sell them at a discounted price. There are some industries or companies that insist on only using the latest models, so they might get rid of their 2 or 3-year-old industrial ovens so they can buy the latest ones.
You can purchase these gently used and refurbished ones, and if you’re just starting your business, that might be a sensible idea. You don’t ever want to cut corners, but at the same time, if a used or refurbished industrial oven can do the same job as a brand-new one, there’s no harm in exploring that option.
Some companies will also let you purchase an industrial oven on an installment plan if you don’t have all the money to put down. This could be one way to avoid a huge, up-front expenditure when you’re trying to get your business off the ground.
Do Your Research
If you do buy a used oven, it’s best to find a company that has an excellent reputation. In this respect, it’s just the same as buying a used car. You want to go to a used car lot with lots of positive feedback, so look around for both used oven prices and what prior clients have said about the seller.
You might also like to read or download our Manufacturing Business Plan
Once you have your industrial ovens in place, you can get to work manufacturing whatever it is you’ve designed. You can attempt to come up with some strategies to dominate your niche.
