Paradoxes
This year’s Heat Treatment Forum in Wroclaw included a visit to the heat treatment plant https://www.ihi-vtn.com/en/wilthen/ in the program. The heat treatment plant is located just outside the border near the city of Bautzen, which is the center of the Lusatian Serbs in Saxony.
Translation: “For all registered participants of the Polish Heat Treatment Forum and users of heat treatment technologies, we are also organizing a trip to the heat treatment plant of the Japanese concern IHI in Germany (near Bautzen), where everyone will be able to see a fully automated line for low-pressure vacuum carburizing (LPC). IHI is the inventor and patent holder of this technology”
Although I have known about this plant for many years, I have never been there. I only drove past it once when I was heading somewhere for climbing in Saxony. It was basically the only competitor of Bodycote Liberec across the border towards Zittau.
The fate of the VTN heat treatment plant in Wilthen is somewhat tied to my history, as well as the history of Karol Forycki. He pulled off a feat when he brokered this acquisition by the Japanese company IHI Group in 2015. According to what can be seen on the website, it is a modern, well-maintained heat treatment operation, with NADCAP certification.
But IHI does not only own this plant, but also owns IHI Hauzer Techno Coating B.V., which was once part of Bodycote Venlo. I was there many times in the past, because one of my best “bosses”, Hans Veltrop, came from there, and Bodycote CEG Group meetings were regularly held in Venlo. However, with the acquisition of Hauzer, IHI also acquired a 50% stake in HVM Plasma in Prague, and that brings us closer to my history, because the remaining 50% is still owned by Jirka Vyskočil. I have already written about him here on my blog (https://www.jstconsultancy.cz/jiri-vyskocil/) , our history was tied to the development of the first deposition devices for TiN, both by arc evaporation NNO-150 and magnetron sputtering DAM 300. Over time, Vláďa Procházka and I converted the arc evaporation device NNO-150 to plasma nitriding, and the planar magnetron sputtering we used the latter until around 2001, when we coated by TiN welding glasses for Severosklo Kamenický Šenov.
So much for history. That’s why I know quite a bit about both HVM Plasma and IHI Hauzer, and even though Bodycote eventually sold the entire coating branch under the IonBond brand to IHI, I never stopped being interested in this field.
When I met Mr. Akihiro Horita, IHI’s marketing director, in Wroclaw last year, I didn’t feel like it was some kind of important secret. That’s why I was surprised that I got on the “Black List” for the above-mentioned excursion to VTN. They simply excluded me from the list of participants.
In the end, nothing happened, just a strange feeling as to why I was on the “Black List“. But there’s no point in dealing with that anymore, so I can only assume that it’s thanks to the representation of ECM Technologies and their LPC, which competes with IHI’s LPC. I have no idea what I could be looking at. I understand the difference between IHI’s LPC and ECM’s LPC, but these are processes that are unrecognizable from the outside of the device.
I’m just glad that even in Japan they already know who I am…
Jiří Stanislav
May 4, 2025
