When you drive into Waukesha, Wisconsin to visit ThermTech, you notice the main thoroughfare has been named after Waukesha’s most famous son, Les Paul. Born here in 1915, Paul was not only a talented jazz, country and blues artist, but also a renowned tinkerer, guitar maker, and pioneer in the music industry. He invested his time, money, and expertise trying to perfect the electric guitar. Paul’s innovations led to the famous Gibson guitars bearing his name that have been played by thousands of musicians worldwide. Les Paul’s original designs and industry-defining inventions earned him a permanent exhibit within the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Founder Chuck Wiberg started ThermTech much like Les Paul approached guitars – with a combination of tinkering and investment. He started ThermTech by rebuilding a scrapped furnace, studied ways to make his equipment meet the demands of his clients, and invested in new technology and employee training to ensure consistent quality and reliability.
As Chuck’s grandson Steven Wiberg Jr., ThermTech’s Director of Vacuum Processing (pictured right), explained, “ThermTech was my grandfather’s second heat-treating business. After the economic downturn in the late ’70s, he’d sold his first heat-treating business to work for another established heat-treating company, but quickly realized that he preferred being his own boss.”
Steven recounted, “One evening, he came home to my grandmother to tell her he’d mortgaged the house and sold his boat to start ThermTech.” He paused, laughed, and added, “She kicked him out for a few nights.”
Tinkering and Investment
Chuck Wiberg started ThermTech with a furnace that he’d rescued from a scrapyard and rebuilt himself. Though ThermTech may have started small, Chuck took on any job that came his way, steadily growing the company to meet the needs of his customers.
“The entirety of ThermTech could fit back in the corner of what’s now our vacuum cell. Back then, (Chuck) had to use a lot of elbow grease to get things to turn out,” Steven said.
By the mid-’90s, Chuck’s son Steven Wiberg Sr. had joined the company, having studied metallurgy. At that time, ThermTech started to see customers seeking them out from larger companies like Johnson Brass, J&L Fiber and Castalloy. The heat-treating department had grown significantly, focused mostly on atmospheric and open fire furnaces, which necessitated investment in staff growth and training. In an interview on the ThermTech YouTube channel, Chuck Wiberg explained that to beat their competition and grow, they needed to invest in better controls and better knowledge.
“I knew that we needed to be technical, we had to sell ourselves in technical terms. That’s why we chose the name ThermTech.”
Chuck Wiberg, ThermTech Founder
In the early 2000s, Chuck passed his ownership to his children, son Steven Wiberg Sr. and daughter Mary Springer. Together, they led the company through the next phase of growth. Steven Jr. remembered visiting the company in his youth, sweeping the floor and racking parts in the summers of his middle school years. “We grew when other companies struggled because we provided consistent quality and reliable turnaround.”
Innovation and Reinvestment
Today, ThermTech has expanded to three campuses and employs 180 workers. There are five full-time metallurgists on staff, including ThermTech President Steven Wiberg Sr. and Director of Operations Chuck Hartwig who help to ensure that ThermTech continues to meet the high-tech demands of the heat-treating business.
“I’m most proud of the amount of growth in our personnel,” Steven Wiberg Jr. explained. “As we have invested in new equipment, we also invested in creating new training systems to ensure that our equipment stays in good condition. While a full training program could take a year for an operator to complete all the modules, we also train them to be able to do routine maintenance, and we send them through Ipsen U.”
Steven Jr. added, “Developing training materials doesn’t show returns on your investment right away. It’s harder to gauge work when you’re not seeing a pile of steel moving from one place to another, but when you watch your employees troubleshooting independently, that’s wonderful to see.”
Seeing the Investment Pay Off
A row of Ipsen ATLAS oil-quench atmosphere furnaces radiate heat from a production bay adjacent to the vacuum furnace cell. It’s just one of several bays on the campus that are processing thousands of high-quality precision parts, gears, and blanks for hundreds of customers every day.
ThermTech added their first vacuum furnace in the early 2000s. They could quickly see the advantages of adding vacuum furnaces to their heat-treating services and followed up by acquiring a couple additional used production vacuum furnaces. A VFS and two competitor furnaces sporting Ipsen hot zones are currently running production parts.
The two newest additions to the ThermTech vacuum furnace cell are bright blue Ipsen TurboTreater model H5448 6-bar vacuum furnaces. The ThermTech operators have added googly-eyes to give them a little extra personality.
“When I took over the vacuum department, we were using a VFS 2-bar for small tool and die parts and had two high-pressure gas quenching furnaces. The vacuum department had been the same size for a long time, and we had a lot to learn as far as maintenance goes, but we were seeing the need for additional high-pressure gas quench, so we bought our first Ipsen TurboTreater. We had considered possibly going with a vacuum temper furnace but decided to use our floor space more efficiently by going with the TurboTreater.”
Two years later, ThermTech invested in a second Ipsen TurboTreater. “While we were expanding, a lot of competing vacuum departments were not. They were having maintenance issues, so customers came to us because we had equipment that worked consistently,” Steven explained. “We were able to pull in a lot more work.”
“Our vacuum furnace customers approach us with one of two scenarios; customers who are making parts out of common alloys, or customers who have prints and/or need to conform to some governing specifications. ThermTech has established processes and can batch pieces together to get the hardness to meet the first customer’s need. We also have the ability to develop processes that satisfy the spec and attain the necessary quality for the customers that require that level of precision,” Steven Jr. said.
TurboTreater Model H5448 at a Glance
- Round hot zone with work zone size of 36” x 36” x 48” (914 mm x 914 mm x 1219 mm)
- Max load weight of 3,000 lb (1361 kg)
- Operating temperature up to 2,400 ºF (1315 ºC)
- Internal gas quenching
- Quench pressure up to 6 bar
- Designed to decrease cycle times and reduce gas consumption
Investing in the Future
In the last year, ThermTech purchased a building in New Berlin, just 15 minutes down the road from Waukesha. They plan to consolidate their atmosphere furnaces, IQ furnaces, and forging operations in the new location. Steven Wiberg Jr. sees that as an opportunity to further expand their vacuum furnace operations in Waukesha.
“We look to continue to invest in new furnaces and new hot zones. We’ve invested a lot, expanding considerably over the last decade. In the last five years alone, we’ve invested about $2 million per year towards expansion. We’ve added new equipment, new buildings, and as a result, we have new capabilities. (Our investment) has allowed us to retain the ability to accommodate requests,” Steven Jr. explained.
“We’re willing to invest in what the market will justify. With the amount of work and effort we’ve put into ThermTech, the ship is ours to steer to the land we want.”
For more information about ThermTech, visit their website at https://www.thermtech.net/.
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