kel, 1/2 per cent
chromium steel.--Heat to 1,600 deg.F. Hold at this temperature until
the work is uniformly heated; pull from the furnace and cool in air.

0.15 to 0.25 per cent carbon, 3-1/2 per cent nickel steel.--Heat
to 1,575 deg.F. Hold at this temperature until the work is uniformly
heated; pull from the furnace and cool in air.

CARE IN ANNEALING.--Not only will benefits in machining be found
by careful annealing of forgings but the subsequent troubles in
the hardening plant will be greatly reduced. The advantages in
the hardening start with the carburizing operation, as a steel of
uniform and fine grain size will carburize more uniformly, producing
a more even hardness and less chances for soft spots. The holes in
the gears will also "close in more uniformly," not causing some
gears to require excessive grinding and others with just enough
stock. Also all strains will have been removed from the forging,
eliminating to a great extent distortion and the noisy gears which
are the result.

With the steels used, for the heat-treated gears, always of a higher
carbon content, treatment after forging is necessary for machining, as
it would be impossible to get the required production from untreated
forgings, especially in the alloy steels. The treatment is more
delicate, due to the higher percentage of carbon and the natural
increase in cementite together with complex carbides which are
present in some of the higher types of alloys.

Where poor machining conditions in heat-treated steels are present
they are generally due to incomplete solution of cementite rather
than bands of free ferrite, as in the case of case-hardening steels.
This segregation of carbon, as it is sometimes referred to, causes
hard spots which, in the forming of the tooth, cause the cutter
to ride over the hard metal, producing high spots on the face of
the tooth, which are as detrimental to satisfactory gear cutting
as the drops or low spots produced on the face of the teeth when
the pearlite is coarse-grained or in a banded condition.

In the simpler carburized steels it is not necessary to test the
forgings for hardness after annealing, but with the high percentages
of alloys in the carburizing steels and the heat-treated steels
a hardness test is essential.

To obtain the best results in machining, the microstructure of the
metal should be determined and a hardness range set that covers
the variations in structure that produce good mach