The need to venture into new industrial processes, to go hand in hand with metallurgical innovation, arises the idea from the steel materials research group (GMS) to design and build a vacuum furnace for thermal treatments where it will contribute to the growth and academic training of the future metallurgical engineer. Thermal treatments as an important branch of physical metallurgy where observe the variation of mechanical, physical and micro-constituent properties after a treatment, thanks to this we can have materials for the desired uses. These treatments are normally conventional, however, in this project we sought to leave an input of work for future innovation treatments at the metallurgy school. Vacuum furnaces for thermal treatments are beginning to have an important boom today, it is based on the principle of having a chamber clean of impurities where with a vacuum pump reach minimum pressures of 10-2, 10-3 to 10 -5 mbar cleaning is done for a certain time and then it is brought to the desired temperature to carry out the desired treatment: hardening, tempering or annealing. In this project there are many expectations, due to the great use that can be had for both undergraduate areas and for master's and doctorate studies. The AISI-SAE 1045 steel specimen used as a sample for the thermal treatment of quenching improved its hardness in 5 points of hardness Rockwell C with the thermal treatment of quenching in vacuum compared to the same specimen of steel AISI-SAE 1045, performing conventional tempering and using the same variables.