A look at an HAI member up close and personal.
For more than 40 years, Hitemco has specialized in high-performance surface coatings, providing diffusion, grinding, and thermal-spray processing services to enhance military and commercial aerospace parts. The family-owned company recently expanded, opening an additional 10,000-square-foot facility near its main location in Old Bethpage, New York, allowing it to serve its growing number of customers.
Diffusion Coating and Thermal Spraying
Hitemco provides diffusion coatings on a variety of parts, including hot section turbine engine components, blades, vanes, and shrouds, to protect them from oxidation, corrosion, and sulfidation.
Thermal spray coatings, added to Hitemco’s offerings in the 1980s, include plasma, wire, and HVOF (high-velocity oxygen fuel) coatings. Over the past decade, the company has enhanced these coatings by adding extensive in-house precision-grinding capabilities to the process. Thermal-spray applications for the aerospace industry include helicopter main-rotor shafts and tail forks, HVOF landing-gear parts, jet engine swirlers, aerospace pistons and actuators, and torque bars.
Standards and Certification
Hitemco has considerable experience with stringent aerospace certification and tolerance requirements. The company operates AS9100- and NQA-1–approved quality systems and processes. Customers receive confirmation of the product quality from an on-site metallurgical lab that tests the coatings’ accuracy and strength, as well as the accuracy of surface measurements and dimensions.
The lab employs an X-ray diffraction machine, a high-temperature space reentry simulator, ballistic impact tester, particle speed graphic camera, automated sample polishing equipment for cross-section metallography analysis, stereo microscopes with image analysis software, and air test furnaces.
Competitive pricing and quick turnaround times are a key feature of Hitemco’s business strategy and are possible because of the company’s investment in efficient processes and equipment such as vacuum furnaces, multiple robotic spray cells, state-of-the-art grinding equipment, and full 3-D capabilities.
In addition to aircraft parts, Hitemco services rocket engine parts, satellites, orbital vehicles, nuclear power-plant parts, hydrogen and solid oxide fuel cells, and CT and X-ray devices.
