Being an Engineer

S7E5 Scott Roberts | The Stainless Steel Hardening Process Most Engineers Don’t Know Exists

Aaron Moncur Season 7 Episode 5

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Scott Roberts is the North American Regional Sales Manager for Bodycote’s S³P technologies, where he oversees the sales team and rep network responsible for bringing one of the most unique surface hardening processes to manufacturers across the country. The S³P family of treatments—including Kolsterising—uses low-temperature carbon diffusion to create exceptionally hard, wear-resistant surfaces while preserving the corrosion resistance that stainless steels and cobalt-chromium alloys are valued for.

Scott didn’t begin his career in materials science or engineering, yet he has built deep expertise in helping engineers and manufacturers solve hard problems related to wear, galling, friction, and component longevity. Through roles ranging from business development to market management, he has spent nearly 10 years guiding customers through when and why processes like Kolsterising offer a major performance advantage—and how they differ from more traditional hardening methods that can cause distortion, cracking, or loss of corrosion resistance.

Before joining Bodycote, Scott worked in metals sales for aerospace customers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and GKN, giving him early insight into how demanding applications push material limits. He has since combined that application-level understanding with extensive real-world customer consulting, helping companies in medical devices, industrial equipment, energy, and beyond adopt surface-engineering solutions that extend component life and reduce failure rates.

Today Scott is a key voice in the growing conversation around advanced diffusion-based hardening technologies. His passion is teaching engineers what these processes can (and cannot) do, clarifying common misconceptions, and helping teams make smarter decisions about material selection and treatment—especially when performance requirements are mission-critical.

LINKS: 

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-roberts-574aa94/

Guest website: https://www.bodycote.com/ 

 

Aaron Moncur, host

 

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Scott Roberts:

Comes in the meeting, all rushed, you know, throws a pile of fasteners, nuts and bolts, on the table in front of me, and says, How much? Who am I paying you to treat these fasteners right now? And I said, you know, I don't know, a nickel a piece, something like that. And he goes, Man, you kidding me? He goes, You could have told me, $25 a piece. He goes, every time I have to replace one of those fasteners for a galling issue. It's $1,000 in downtown.

Aaron Moncur:

Hello and welcome to another riveting episode of The being an engineer podcast today, we have Scott Roberts with us, who is the North American application specialist at body coat, where he leads the team responsible for educating and promoting the s3 pulsarizing process, an advanced low temperature diffusion technology that dramatically increases the hardness and wear resistance of stainless steels and cobalt chromium alloys. With more than a decade in market development at body coat, Scott has become a trusted guide for engineers looking to push the performance and longevity of critical medical metal components. Scott, thanks so much for being with us today.

Scott Roberts:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Aaron Moncur:

All right, so tell us a little bit about this s3 pulsarizing process, how it's used, how it's different from from competing technologies out there. Yeah.

Scott Roberts:

So the the simplest form of what it actually is, is a thermal chemical, carbon based diffusion process designed specifically for stainless steels. I think traditionally, you know, stainless steels have been great for corrosion resistant applications, but they have their natural drawbacks. Those would be galling wearing fatigue and cavitation, erosion, and so this technology is specifically designed to accommodate or overcome those, those common issues on stainless steel process, parts and products.

Aaron Moncur:

How does the process work? So

Scott Roberts:

what would happen is, you would you create a finished component, or an end user would create a finished component. They would send that component to my facility in Ohio and North Carolina. I would process it with the coastal rising technology. We inspect it, pack it back up and ship it back to you.

Aaron Moncur:

Now, I first heard of this coastal rising process from a friend of mine in the industry. He works at a large medical device company. This is someone who is very, very experienced in engineering, developing hard goods products. He was actually a guest quite a while back on the podcast himself, and he spoke so incredibly highly of this process. He said, For what it does, it is the best process that that he has ever worked with. Can you speak a little bit to the like the physics behind it? I mean, from a physics standpoint, how does this process work? How does it harden the surface?

Scott Roberts:

Yeah, so what is happening in the process is we're using some chemicals and temperature to activate the natural passive layer on the stainless steel. We're then diffusing the carbon into the interstitial spacing between the existing components, so it's being trapped in there, and essentially compresses those components together. We actually see an increase of compost compressive stresses, and it creates a hardness from a super saturation of the carbon layer without disrupting any of the mechanical properties. So your tensile strength, your yield, your elongation, they're all completely maintained. We're just putting in some packing material being the carbon to compress it all together and keep it all nice and neat.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay, so I'm no material scientist or metallurgist, so forgive me if I get some of the the terminology incorrect, but what I'm hearing is, you've got these molecules of stainless steel, and there's, you know, some space in between the atoms, the molecules in this material, and you're just filling that empty space in with carbon so that there's less chance for those molecules to kind of flex in or away from one another. Is that, is that more or less what we're saying here? Yeah.

Scott Roberts:

I mean, that's, that's pretty accurate, yeah, naturally, you know, you have your existing elements in stainless, you have your iron, your nickel, your molybdenum, and they're all in there. And they're, you know, they're packaging together with some grain boundaries and structure to the thing. And, yeah, we're putting carbon where there isn't anything existing right now, and it pushes those essentially together.

Aaron Moncur:

Very cool. Okay, what are some of the the problems in other surface hardening technology? Is that that this s3 pulsarizing process solves?

Scott Roberts:

Yeah, so quite often. You know, one of the most common situations that people are trying to address or use the technology for would be coatings. That's what's probably what we compete against most often. And you know, coatings are great for a lot of different things, but they also have some natural drawbacks. A lot of coatings tend to add dimensions. They have to build up on a surface rather than penetrate, like a diffusion process, like our process does, additionally, coatings tend to have the hardened layer be consistent throughout, so they can be brittle. You have an extremely hard layer on top of a soft base, and then upon impact, it can crap or crack or delaminate or chip in some way where the coastal rising also doesn't do that. Sometimes it requires a pre polishing or post polishing to get a finish that you might like, or a finish it that will proper adhere the coating to. And then you can't bend it or flex it. Some other heat treatments can sometimes also be applied to stainless you know, sometimes nitriding is applied to certain grades. The biggest drawback on something like that is it's a high temperature process. Once you start pushing over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, you run the risk of creating chromium carbides or nitrides, which deplete the Chromium out of the stainless steel and lower the corrosion resistance. Additionally, speaking, when you start putting parts against some high temperatures like that, you run the risk of distortion or warping as well, and you don't have any of this as well with the cold striding, because it is performed at a low temperature,

Aaron Moncur:

I'm gonna admit to not fully understanding that the meaning of a word here, coasterizing, what? What does colsterizing actually mean? What? Like? What's the technical definition of that word?

Scott Roberts:

So coastalizing is the name of the process that we implement. Our group is referred to as the s 3p group within body coat specialty stainless steel process, 3s and a p, and the technology underneath the envelope is called colsterizing. It was named for a man named Ben colster in the 1980s who developed it in the Netherlands.

Aaron Moncur:

Got it. Okay, cool. So this colsterizing process sounds like it's pretty generally applicable to stainless steel for, you know, whatever application might benefit from it. Are there particular, like industries or applications where you've seen this just be like a no brainer, or is it just, you know, across the board, used all over the place?

Scott Roberts:

I mean, you raise a good point. Aaron, people are using stainless across multiple markets, and really, if you have one of those issues, it can be applicable for you to alleviate those issues. That being said, you know, certain industries definitely either require more critical application or performance or are using grades of stainless that you know don't have another solution. Like in the medical and food industry, there's quite a bit of Austin at 8304, or 316, and there's not really good solutions for that grade. Outside of this process, in areas like oil and gas, you see a lot of exotic alloys, like inconels and hastoys, where they're investing in those grades. So they really want to keep their investment protected, and so it's a nice solution for those. We actually will be heading to SHOT Show again in January, and the fire mines industry is an interesting industry as well for this process, because of the distortion of nitriding or the not wanting to do a coating and those sort of things. But I mean, we're in everything from food and beverage, medical, pump and valve, automotive, firearm, oil, gas, chemical, you name it. If they're stainless, you probably have an issue, and we can help you with that. Cool.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay, of course it the answer is going to be, it depends on the part, I'm sure. But generally speaking, how does this process compare with competing processes from a price standpoint? Is it, is it less expensive? Is it more expensive? Is it roughly the same?

Scott Roberts:

I would say it's somewhere in the middle, maybe middle to high range. You know, we tend to be less expensive than something like hard chrome or electroless nickel or diamond like coatings, but it's more expensive than a simple nitriding your to your point. You know, there's not really a fixed price per pound, and it can be application based. But I think as far as the solution is concerned, it's definitely reasonable. Most of the markets I deal with have no issue with overcoming the cost to first the value. You know, we often offer trials that are at a reduced cost or free or in order to show people the value. Because at the end of the day, I could talk about how great it is all day long, but if it never actually works in your application, it doesn't do you any good. So we actually pride ourselves on offering trials all day long to really show what the process can do for you.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, terrific. Okay, how about volumes? I mean, is this an ideal process for for lower volumes, or does it work equally well for for higher volumes? Like, how well does it scale? I guess as volumes increase or decrease, for that matter,

Scott Roberts:

it's a batch process. So really, onesie, twosie, all the way up to 1000s. 10 1000s are perfectly okay with me. I'm happy to process any parts. We are running loads in every single batch, every single week, and we're not going to hold back parts if we're not full or something like that. So if you have one component or if you have multiple components, it really makes no difference to us. We're happy to accommodate. Okay?

Aaron Moncur:

It's, it's nice to hear kind of a general description of an application, but it can be difficult to identify specific applications. I know from my own personal experiment experience, when, when learning about a new process. Do you have any any stories that you can share where maybe you are working with an engineering team, and the thought from from the team was, maybe we need to change alloys, because this one isn't isn't hard enough. When really you and your team came in, you were able to identify that actually you just need a cultureizing process and not a change of alloy.

Scott Roberts:

Oh, yeah. I mean, I have countless stories there, and I don't know how much time you have, a lot of them. A lot of them are quite fun. You know, I was meeting with a beer manufacturer at one point, and, you know, meeting with the maintenance engineer, director of maintenance, and those guys are always busy, right? And so we set the meeting. He comes in the meeting, all rushed, you know, throws a pile of fasteners, nuts and bolts, on the table in front of me, and says, How much? Who am I paying you to treat these fasteners right now? And I said, you know, I don't know, a nickel a piece, something like that. He goes, Man, you kidding me? He goes, You could have told me. $25 a piece. He goes every time I have to replace one of those fasteners for a going issue. It's $1,000 in downtown. Wow. So I said, Well, your new price is$25 a piece. But, you know, it's okay. So, I mean, that's that. That's one, another one. You know, in the food industry, actually, it's a process, a company that is packaging cosmetics and different makeups and gels and creams and that sort of thing. And, you know, we met with one of the guys there, and he they had a sugar based scrub that was going to be going through their line. And everybody else said, we're not going to make it through one production run. We're gonna have to replace the line three or four times to make it to the run. And he says, I found this process. It's gonna work, trust me. And so we ran some parts for him, some plungers and some dosing nozzles. And sure enough, it made it all the way through the product. Actually, two runs of it. And he became a hero at his facility, you know. And the next time we came there, he's walking us around the facility, introducing to this guy. These were the guys I told you about, you know. And this is what it was. And so, you know, those are fun experiences. And you just get to sort of see behind the curtain of some of these manufacturing sites and some of these applications that you might not have ever thought of before, but really can make a difference for someone.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, once you show that you can actually solve a problem for someone, those doors tend to open wide open. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Backing up a little bit, looking at this a little bit more, more high level. Are there, like common misconceptions that that you've seen engineers typically have when it comes to hardening stainless steels, or does everyone out there just know exactly you know everything about it? Oh no, not at all.

Scott Roberts:

You know a lot. Of lot of what I do is educating. I mean, from speaking to classrooms of engineers to walking in a site that I've done business with for a decade and raising my hand and saying, Who here knows what coastal rising is? I have a room of 10 engineers all shake their heads, and I'll say, Okay, well, why are you using it? And they say, well, it's on the drawing. And I'll say, Well, who wrote the drawing? And they're like, That guy's been going for five years. And so it's, it's constantly educating and re educating that exists. So, I mean, people, one people, don't believe you can harden stainless steel, because if they've tried to do it by traditional heat treatment methods, they've destroyed it. Especially, like I said, Austin addicts are duplexes, so they don't believe it can happen. Two, they don't typically believe I'm getting as hard as I actually can get the alloy, alloys, which is around 70, Rockwell seed, which is incredibly hard. Three, they hear, you know, carbon, and their first instinct is, well. What's happening by corrosion? You know, are you rolling the corrosion or destroying the corrosion? Because, you know, if you add carbon to most things, it's going to turn into a rust type situation. And so we have to sometimes prove that or show that. And then the last is embrittlement. You know, people hear 70 Rockwell C and they think, oh, it's going to crack, and it actually doesn't. It actually bends and moves because it's hard to set its surface and gradually reduces within its own layer back to the base metal. So those are the things we have to overcome. And then, of course, just nay saying, you know, engineers love to touch and feel and believe and see for themselves. And again, that's where the trialing comes in, to really show them, show them that it does what we say it does. Yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

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Scott Roberts:

I've had had that situation before. It can be hit or miss, though, because, generally speaking, a 2d two tool steel, it's pretty inexpensive, it's pretty hard, and so, you know, some from a cost perspective, it might always make sense to go to a stainless steel tooling application, but I have had it done, especially in the automotive industry, where they need a mod magnetism, and they so they chose that 304305 alley. For that reason, recently been doing some dyes for extruded elements in aerospace, which has proven to be incredibly successful in that industry as well. So definitely see some tooling. But a lot of times, if you've chosen tool steel, you've chosen it for a reason, and you don't need the corrosion. So it doesn't make sense necessarily, to go to go somewhere else.

Aaron Moncur:

That makes sense. Does it work equally well across different alloys of stainless steel? You know, 303304, 316, 420,

Scott Roberts:

generally speaking, the harness profile is the same. We can get around the same harness level on all those where you see the difference between some of the alloys will be your average case step. So, you know, an ink and l won't receive the carbon the same way an Austin addict will a moranging. You know, 300 receives the carbon very well, even more than than that Austin addict did. Martin Citic alloys don't receive carbon in the same way without the addition of nitrogen, so they need a slight modification on the process in order to get a proper diffuse zone. So the alloy will sometimes dictate some changes. But for the harness profile, they're almost all identical around that that high range,

Aaron Moncur:

to what extent is your team still developing or improving applications of the coastal rising process? Or is it, you know, the process is pretty much set at this point. It's never going to change it, you know, you get what you get, and that's all, what it's going

Scott Roberts:

to be. Oh, we are constantly trying to innovate and get out ahead of things, or taking customer feedback and trying to accommodate an additional solution, or trying to be more proactive and dynamic. Some examples of that are an increase in our size envelope, you know, being able to process bigger parts. That's been something we've developed over the years, we were getting feedback. I don't know if you've ever worked with Austin addict cold work fasteners. You know, sometimes they'll cold work the fastener from some mechanical properties. Well, if you do that to an Austin addict alloy, sometimes you can create deformation martensite, which has lowered the corrosion of the grade. And you can tell if you've done that by putting a magnet to it, if it has magnetism, then there's martensite there. Well, the cold starizing process, we found, can sometimes speed that reduction of corrosion up on those particular cold worked fasteners. And so we actually developed a technology to accommodate that, where you sacrifice a little bit of the hardness, a little bit of the depth, but you don't see that speed up of the lower corrosion on those particular things. So that's been something we developed over the years. Things with our cleaning line, you know, just being more efficient, being being more clean. Yeah, we're always looking to do testing or another. Lab setting, or working with universities to discover additional benefits or value add. We recently worked with a educational system in France where they were studying hydrogen enrollment. You know, in some ways the automotive industry hydrogen compression engines might be the future. And so we were working with a lab, and we discovered that coastal rising actually reduced hydrogen and burnament by nearly 40% Wow, yeah, so, so, yeah, we're constantly looking at the next thing and the next direction we could go. Nice.

Aaron Moncur:

You had mentioned that the size of parts that you're you're increasingly able to accommodate larger part sizes. What? What's the current range of part sizes that this process will accommodate?

Scott Roberts:

So the basket itself is about a 20 inch diameter by 23 inch tall cylinder right now. So that's sort of our size envelope. We are bringing a bigger unit to the United States is actually being installed right now in my Mooresville, North Carolina facility, and it can accommodate four foot diameter, but up to six foot long parts, wow. Significant size. Envelope increase, huge

Aaron Moncur:

increase, sir. Oh, man, what? What drove that? I imagine there are some specific applications that drove this dramatic size increase. Can you talk about any of those?

Scott Roberts:

Well, we actually had the technology. We've had it in Germany for a while, and as a US person who is responsible for, you know, illustrating what this this brings to the market, we've always said places in oil and gas especially need that bigger size where their valves alone, you know, can can be over two foot, be over four foot. And so once we started to develop and gain more of traction in industries like that, the need to have the bigger size has just become more and more evident.

Aaron Moncur:

Got it okay, that makes sense. Are there any other like, specific stories or applications you can think of where maybe the coastal rising process solved a galling problem, or, like a where, where problem? Any other examples that you can share to help spark in the minds of those listening to this. Oh, I could use it for, you know, for this project or for that project.

Scott Roberts:

Yeah. So, you know, working with a medical company that we've been doing business with as long as I've been here, you know, I finally got the opportunity to meet the individual who actually had developed coastal rising process with their company. And he told me this story. He said that they were working with suture cutters where, you know, they were looking for a tool that could tie off and cut the suture cleanly during the surgery and without having any burrs or braise or a fraying of the of the suture or the line itself. And they had tried 400 series Martin civic stuff. They had tried 17, four and an H on Hutter condition. They tried all the traditional things to try and get a hard, but corrosion resistant stainless blade to cut the suture cleanly. And their goal was to get to six clean cuts. Six, we think about that. That's not very many, right, when you think about it. And they were getting to four, they were getting to five, they were getting to three, and just never were able to get to six. And finally, he found coastal rising. And not only was he able to switch to a three or four alloy for more corrosion resistance, but after we treated it, we got consistently to 60 cuts without any

Aaron Moncur:

issues. 66 060,

Scott Roberts:

so Wow, never looked back. Never looked back after that.

Aaron Moncur:

See, that's really interesting, because I'm not very familiar with this process, and I've been thinking of it as kind of like, I don't know, chunkier, blockier parts, but, but thinking of it as as a blade, that's a pretty delicate, precise instrument that I hadn't even thought about before. So edge treatment on a blade is a good application.

Scott Roberts:

Oh, absolutely. You know, with it being a diffusion as well, you don't round off the edge if you had if some coatings need to adhere to a flat surface, and they'll round an edge on you. In the poultry industry, we're also seeing a good deal of success on three or four blades. Again, they were using Martin Citic alloys. What they were seeing was an embrittlement of the blade that would sometimes create chipping. So they're having to throw product away and replace the blades. We got them to switch to a three or four, added coaster rising end. They went from a two hour pm maintenance schedule to a two week pm maintenance schedule on a blade and eliminate the chipping issue.

Aaron Moncur:

That's fantastic. Okay, so you had mentioned earlier that one of the challenges you've had is just convincing engineers that this actually works like it does what I say it's going to do, and that can be tough, because I know myself included, engineers are skeptical, and we are very risk of. First, and we want to see proof that this thing actually does what we're being told it's going to do. What? What has your team been able to do to help, like, just prove the process to engineers? Yeah. So we

Scott Roberts:

have data. We have general data that we typically present when we meet with a group, we usually will give a technical presentation that includes some of what we've talked about, some slides and some imagery of the process itself and what we're actually physically doing, and then sort of the back half of the presentation illustrates the benefits and standardized tests that we've done that illustrate those So an example would be the G 98 button test for galling. We show the galling threshold in that particular certified test. We also have a video, if you go to YouTube and you search Body Code, coasterizing, galling, you'll see a video of technical manager in Germany illustrating anti galling properties on some samples. We have wear test, Tabor abrasion wear test, the ball on disc wear test that we illustrate and show the data surrounding our performance in those tests, bending, rotating fatigue tests, as well as a comparison to springs directly against shot painting, in fact, and then G ASM, G 32 anti cavitation test. Are some of the illustrations that we show, you know, just to get the ball rolling. And then, of course, you know, we have the conversations about their particular applications, and sometimes able to illustrate, like examples where I knew we were successful, but at the end of the day, really, it really comes back. To give me a part. Let me take it with me, let me, let me treat it for you, and then you put it on your equipment, put it on a test stand, gave it to an end using customer and let them tell you exactly how great it was. And that works more times than not. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Are there applications where one might think that s3 pulse rising would be a good fit. But actually, there's a trick here that that particular application, no, that's not a good fit. Are there any, you know, gotchas like that that you can think of?

Scott Roberts:

Oh, yeah. I mean, like any, any other solution, it's, it's good a lot of time, but it's not perfect for everything. You know. One thing would be, like an anti leaching. You know, some coatings are designed to be self lubricating, so like a Teflon, you know, where they don't want the stickiness in those circumstances. I'm not the ideal application like that. You know, it's a difference between, if it's something is wearing and embedding versus sticking. But typically, my instinct would be all right, I'm not going to be best. There also had a customer one time he was he was doing a pump rotor, and he said, Nothing is working on it. I said, Okay, well, what are you pumping? He goes, I'm pumping a sand slurry, about 90% sand. And I said, Oh, okay. I said, Well, we'll give it a shot, but I don't know how well this is gonna go. And so I treated pars to send them back to him. And sure enough, it, you know, it lasted 10 seconds or whatever, before he sand blasted the thing off. And so, yeah, that wasn't ideal. High heat, anything that is pushing temperature ranges into 1000 1200 1300 F for extended periods of time may not work out. You might see a further diffusion of the Corbin into the owl and just basically lose the benefit, but not create any adverse effect. Just just lose what you're trying to do. So those would be the ones that I would say maybe not ideal. I have had some people push the temperature range and suppressors and and, you know, different mechanical seals and that sort of thing. And we have shown performance there, but we typically say, stay at 1000 F and under.

Aaron Moncur:

You're gonna be good. But got it that's really helpful to hear. Do you see, like, I don't know. Looking into the next five years or so, are there any new or emerging applications or industries where this is going to be a great fit? I know that you and your team like you mentioned, are always innovating, trying to improve the process, any big leaps in the technology or new methods of applying it, that that we can look forward to, not that the applications right now are, you know, limiting it all sounds like there are already so many different ways that an engineer could use this, but anything new opening up over the next several years, you know?

Scott Roberts:

I don't, I don't think so. Like getting a big size is going to be a big one for the US is that's, that's brand new, right? That's supposed to have been q1 here. So that'll open up a lot of doors for us, some emerging markets, though, that we're seeing success in, that we haven't been in the traditional sense of what we would approach would be those in space, seeing rocket applications. Applications and cooling systems and those types of applications, and then AI, you know, obviously, if you're not paying attention to what's going on with AI out there, you're you're not noticing that it's blowing up. And so we've actually seen some application in the cooling systems for data stacks. Oh, interesting. And yeah, so the more processing power that's going to be required to generate all this AI, the more type of technology that you're going to have to keep those things cool and running, and you don't want leaks or anything like that. So some of the tubing, piping, pumping, of that type of cooling applications, I think, could be a big plateau for us in the next couple of

Aaron Moncur:

years so you clearly know your stuff when it comes to surface treatments. You've spent a career developing that knowledge base for engineers who are listening to this that you know maybe aren't as far along in their careers as you are, any tools or resources that you can recommend for those engineers who want to learn more about surface treatments, you know, the internet is full of of resources and different things out there, but anything in specific, in particular that you recommend?

Scott Roberts:

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of companies mine, included, are more and more offering educational webinars. You know, I know that's a big focus for us going into 2026 is to say, hey, you know, if we can't get to you, or you're not going to be an area where we're traveling in, here's something online that you can just participate in for 1520 minutes and really get a good grasp for not only what this is, but some of the things it competes against. And I think that's a generally a good resource for people, you know, Google can be a little bit of a miss. Ironically, you know, I've, I've Googled certain terms and not been able to find what I wanted. So don't always, don't always, trust Google. Some of the message boards can be good because I think, generally speaking, the people who post on there want to truly help and offer suggestions and solutions to things that you may be dealing with. But of course, reach out to body coat, whereas I only focus on this particular technology, I'm happy to pay liaison to other activities and that you may be doing or issues you're trying to resolve. Bicoup does have other coatings and other divisions, multiple heat trading options, including some proprietary stuff outside of this technology. So there's a lot of metal energy and engineering information within my organization that we're happy to share and help educate people. Terrific.

Aaron Moncur:

What? What is the best way for engineers to reach out to you?

Scott Roberts:

Oh, they can reach me via email. At Scott dot Roberts, R O, B, E, R T S, at bodycoat, B, O, D, y, C, O, T, e.com, you can find me on LinkedIn, pretty active user of the LinkedIn platform. Call me on my cell phone, 316-633-2362, and of course, you can go to the body quote website, and you can fill out an inquiry, but if you reach out directly to me, it's going to come much quicker than through the system that has to flow through some audit trails and everything like that. But yeah, if they need me, feel free to reach out. It bothers my family, but I typically have this thing on me, and I'm typically looking at it so well.

Aaron Moncur:

First of all, thank you to your family for being so supportive of that. I know that it is such a huge benefit when I can reach a company, you know, quickly and directly. There was an application that we were working on recently, I was mostly working on quoting a project, and it required a pretty specific glue dispensing technology. And there's this large glue dispensing company out there. I won't say the name of it, but I spent, no joke, three weeks trying to get in touch with the right person at this company. And I filled out forms on their website. I called phone numbers I got passed off to this person, and then that group, and then that group and this person, and it literally three weeks of this, and I still never got in touch with the right person. I finally threw my hands up and said, Forget this. I'm moving on to someone else. So you know, the fact that you're willing to share your your cell phone number on this podcast is huge, because that can often mean the difference between a company like mine finding a solution in a tolerable timeline and just being incredibly frustrated and missing timeline. So thank you for being so open there

Scott Roberts:

absolutely I mean, our time is so valuable, right? And so if you're chasing something for so long, eventually you're going to raise your hands. It's. Forget it. You know, like I got better things I can do. I got more valuable things I can do. So I pride myself on trying to reply to everybody within 24 hours, unless it's Christmas or something like that, right coming up, but at least I'm going to get back to you and tell you I'm working on it, or I have a solution, or put you in touch with the right person. It's just the way we operate

Aaron Moncur:

that right there is huge. All right. Well, Scott, anything else that you'd like to share that we haven't touched on yet, about the coastal rising process or body coat in general?

Scott Roberts:

No, I don't think so. I mean, if there was a question that somebody has, please don't hesitate to reach out. You know, we like questions. Questions are great. It prevents, it provides a dialog, and encourages a dialog. And, you know, I say this to all the time to people I work with, you know, I we love to do these types of podcasts. We like to do educational sessions, because at the end of the day, yeah, we're in a business, but we're really looking just be partners with people. You know, the more successful that I can help you, grow alleviate this issue, whatever might be, the more successful I'll be as well. So we're a solution provider, and that's what we're that's what we're looking to do. I'm not getting rich. I'm here. I've been here for a while. I keep playing the Powerball, but that doesn't seem to work out. So you know, I'm going to continue to be here, and I'm going to continue to work with people and help them get rid of their nightmares. Excellent.

Aaron Moncur:

All right, well, Scott, thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge and wisdom today, some really specific and useful information that hopefully engineers can take and use for their surface treatment projects, surface hardening projects. Appreciate your time, and we'll look forward to getting this out there and sharing it with the community of engineers.

Scott Roberts:

Very good. Thanks again for having me.

Aaron Moncur:

I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. Being an engineer has more than 300 episodes, and you don't have to listen to them in order. If you're dealing with a specific challenge right now, there's a good chance we've already interviewed an engineer who's been through it. You can jump around, search by topic and listen to what's most relevant to you see you on the next episode.