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January 2, 2025

Heat Treat Today is privileged to oversee the 40 Under 40 recognition awards highlighting a group of rising young leaders in the North American heat treat industry every year. The Class of 2024 is a high-achieving, motivated, and heart-felt group of significant contributors to the heat treat market. Here are two highlights from this year’s class.  

Christopher James, general manager at James Legacy Corporation DBA Metalex Thermal Specialties, has been the driving force behind the company’s growth and development since assuming the position in September 2020. Under his  guidance, revenue has seen remarkable growth year after year, with a notable 25% increase from 2021 to 2022, and sustained growth thereafter. Through his proactive efforts, the company expanded equipment, enhancing its heat treating capabilities and refining processes. Chris tirelessly promotes the brand within the manufacturing community, growing the company’s relationships with new clients. His active involvement in industrial organizations, such as the Colorado Advanced Manufacturing Association, has facilitated valuable connections and collaborations within the industry. Moreover, he played a pivotal role in METALEX obtaining its AS9100 certification in 2022, and he has been spearheading efforts to secure Nadcap and MedAccred certifications by the end of 2024. His instrumental contribution to the acquisition and seamless relocation to a new facility in 2023 ensured minimal downtime, underscoring his strategic planning and operational expertise. With his planning of the move, the company was only down for one week while all equipment was moved to the new facility. The new location is critical to continued growth. Read more about Christopher here.

When Gerardo Romero joined Honeywell Aerospace, he led technological projects to relax the company’s dependence on specific alloy specifications and materials to permit alternates, removing unnecessary testing from their processes. Recently, he recognized an opportunity to eliminate one of the heat treat processes the company had been performing, significantly reducing cycle time, scrap, and cost of external lab testing for certain certifications. Another key target was to partially remove the dependency of aluminum braze sheet raw materials from a single source. Gerardo supports Honeywell sites across the world with different applications, such as post-weld heat treating on superalloy components in auxiliar motors, development of heat treat engineers, carburizing and aluminum heat treating transitions, development of nickel-cobalt base wrought alloys heat treating, reverse engineering, product design review, serving as the company’s representative for reviewing of aluminum AMS heat treat specifications, subject matter expert of heat treating and brazing processes in failure analyses, design for brazing and heat treating, quenching distortion control, and avoidance of over-aging in high strength cast aluminum alloys.

In the last three years, he has led the sourcing, development, and approval of more than twenty different heat treat capabilities in Mexico and participated in over ten projects to change specs and approve new sources for raw material, with significant cost savings for the company. He has led at least ten different engineering change orders to legacy drawings in the company and has been part of the effort to develop and maintain Nadcap accreditation for Honeywell’s sites in Mexico. Read more about Gerardo here.

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