The mechanical properties of AISI 4140 steel shaft with a diameter larger than 200 mm are difficult to meet the requirements and cracking occurs easily in water quenching, due to insufficient cooling ability of oil quenching. A new technology, named alternately timed quenching (ATQ), using water and air in turn as quenching media instead of oil or polymer aqueous solution, is applied to quench the large-scale AISI 4140 steel shaft. Two ATQ processes are determined with the aid of computer simulation first and the corresponding experiments are carried out consequently. The results show that the proposed technology can significantly reduce the surface cracking tendency and improve the mechanical properties in practical production of such large-scale shaft forgings. © 2011 Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.