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Where Does Cold Heading Wire & Rod Come From? Part 2 – Hot Rolling

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From Fasteners Technology International, August 2014

In the June/July 2014 issue of this magazine, we began this three-part series tracing the origins of cold heading wire and rod. In Part I, we looked at the steel-making process and how the CHQ wire and rod used in North America today mostly starts out as a combination of smelted or processed iron ore and steel sources melted in electric arc furnaces, refined and continuously cast into intermediate steel products known as billets or blooms.

It is from this point that we pick up the process. In this, Part II, of this series, we will explore how these intermediate products are transformed from a long, usually square or rectangular section of steel, to the “round” coiled rod we associate with raw material for cold heading.

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The Basics of Fastener Sorting

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From Link Magazine, Summer 2014

Over twenty-five years ago when I first started working in the fastener industry PPAP, ISO9000, and zero defects were not yet commonplace ideas. In fact, when I first started, sorting was all manual and reserved pretty much only for salvaging parts that a customer returned with a major problem. Today, it is a very different story. A large percentage of fasteners made or sold in the U.S. are sorted, with some companies serving certain industries or customers adopting the philosophy of sorting 100% of their
parts.

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Where Does Cold Heading Wire & Rod Come From? Part 1 – Steel Making

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From Fasteners Technology International, June 2014

Although our human nature is innately curious, we often simply don’t have the time to fully explore our world and accept many everyday occurrences at face value. For example, when we flip on a light switch we rarely, if ever, consider how that electricity was generated or delivered to our home. In a similar fashion, those of us who manufacturer fasteners rarely give much thought to how the raw materials we start with are transformed into a product that we can successfully cold head.

This article is the first of a three part series that looks at the origins and processes of cold heading quality wire and rod. Part one explores how steel is created today from both scrap and elemental sources and continuously cast into intermediate steel products. Part two will explore how these intermediate products are “broken down” and hot rolled to form coiled bar and rod. Part three will explore how hot rolled product is further processed into wire and rod that can be introduced and used in a cold header.

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The Power of Value Engineering – Converting Screw Machine Parts to Cold Headed Parts

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From Link Magazine, Spring 2014

As markets become more global, customers are ever demanding new ways for suppliers to deliver them value. Over the last ten years or more, these same companies have been reducing their engineering and purchasing staffs, creating a new dependence and responsibility in their vendors to generate both quality and cost improvement ideas. For many distributors, this new responsibility is an unwelcome diversion in their already hectic and changing environment. However, for a select few, these new expectations present a unique opportunity to be exploited and profited from.

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Miniature Thread Forming Screws for Plastics and Light Metals for Electronics Applications

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From Fastener World Magazine, May/June 2014, Volume 146

As handheld electronic devices have gotten smaller and lighter, the fasteners that hold them together have had to follow suit. Although miniature metric and imperial machine screws have been used in eyewear, watches, and cameras for many years, it is only relatively recently that very small variants of thread forming screws have become commonplace. It is impossible to explain why this is the case, but probably stems from the fact that thread forming in plastics and light metals is a practice that has itself only recently gained universal acceptance.

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Galvanic Corrosion: Knowing How It Works and Steps to Protect It Are Important

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From Fasteners Technology International, April 2014

Anyone that has ever worked on rehabbing an older home has probably encountered a plumbing connection where an old galvanized steel pipe that has been connected with a newer copper fitting such as shown in Figure 1 is in bad shape. The discovery of this condition may be purely accidental, or more likely, if such a connection has been in-place for any length of time, the ticking time bomb represented by this condition has finally gone off and it is leaking or broken.

So what is this condition? It is a classic case of galvanic corrosion. Fastener engineers, designers and end users, especially in instances where metals are being clamped in wet environments, must be very wary of this possibility and make efforts to avoid future problems.

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Self-tapping Fasteners for Lightweight Designs

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From SAE International, April 2014

Abstract:  As automotive technology rapidly provides advances in lighter weight designs and materials, the technology to fasten and join them must keep pace. This paper will explore two uniquely different fastening technologies that are being used to address some of today’s demanding application challenges in plastics and thin steel and aluminum sheet. These are two areas of application that have historically provided few good options for designers, especially as they attempt to push the envelope with progressive, light weight designs. The first technology is self- tapping screws for plastics that, although not new, are now evolving to enable smaller bosses and shorter thread engagements, and incorporate light weight design options. Although dependent on the demands of the application, these screws can be produced in both steel and, now, lighter weight materials such as aluminum and plastic. The paper will explore how these technologies can be employed by the designer to obtain desired weight reduction initiatives over more conventional threaded fasteners for fastening plastic. The second technology are self-tapping, thermal forming screws that enable fastening of thin metal sheets that normally are unable to safely accommodate a threaded fastener joint because of the minimum sheet thickness. This technology is proving especially useful in automotive body-in-white applications where multiple stacks of aluminum sheet, mixed applications of aluminum and steel, multiple stacks of thin steel, and applications into extruded aluminum or magnesium members, particularly with one-sided access are necessary. This portion of the paper will specifically explore how this technology allows lighter weight aluminum or thinner steel sheets to be used since a robust and secure threaded joint can be formed. (Article No.: SAE 2014-01-0785)

Available for Purchase on SAE International: http://papers.sae.org/2014-01-0785/

Basics of Austempering — A Thermal Hardening Process for Fasteners over HRC40

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From Fasteners Technology International, February 2014

What do many lawn mower blades and automotive spring steel clips have in common? When considering their applications, probably very little, but in their product realization, they likely have both employed Austempering (a heat treating process) as their method for strengthening and toughening. Although over 75 years old, Austempering is a heat treating process that has really only become practically viable and commercially employed in the last 40 years. Austempering will likely never supplant conventional quench and tempering processes for the majority of threaded fastener applications, yet some of the advantages are so compelling that there will always be interest and activity in expanding the current application field. At hardness levels above 40 HRC, Austempered parts demonstrate improved mechanical properties such as toughness, ductility and strength over their quench and tempered counterparts of comparable hardness. Austempered parts undergo significantly less distortion, which reduces the subsequent cost of post heat treatment remediation.

Since this technology has direct application for the fastener industry, both now and well into the future, it is advisable for practitioners of the industry to have an understanding of the basics and enough information to consider what future possibilities might be waiting out there. The goal of this article is to provide a simplified explanation of this complex process and to explain some of its more compelling advantages.

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Why Fastener Distributors Should Embrace Training

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From Link Magazine, Winter 2013

During a visit home in my junior year of college, I was told a story about something that happened to two brothers I had known from scouting. They were a couple of years younger than me and still in high school at the time. Their father had purchased a car for them with expectations that they were to be responsible for its care and upkeep. In their zeal to prove to their father that he had made a wise investment in their development, they decided to change the oil themselves. So they went out, purchased several quarts of oil, a filter, and proceeded to drain and replace the oil.

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Fastening Solutons: Plastic Clip-On Bosses for Thin Sheet Applicatons

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From Fastener Technology International, December 2013

I have an older garden tractor that I use to cut my grass. Several years ago the engine began to puff smoke and quickly deteriorated to where it was evident that I either needed a new tractor or to rebuild the engine. Since a new, comparable tractor was not in my budget, I decided to rebuild the engine on my own. This meant removing the hood and cowlings to gain access to the engine so that I could take it off the frame and rebuild it. On this tractor, each side of the engine compartment is shrouded by a separate metal panel with two clearance holes in the top corners, which allow a screw to pass through and clamp the panel in place with a metal J-type clip located at a connection point behind the panel. Although this type of joint had worked fine for almost 30 years, after removing these screws and reconnecting them a couple of times, the much harder spring steel clip “stripped” the threads off of the softer screws and they began to back-out. Of course this created a problem when the tractor was running because there was no clamp load left and the panels would vibrate loudly.

Initially, my solution was to retighten the screws, later I began rotating them between joints, and finally I replaced the old screws with new ones. None of these solutions worked for long and I finally got fed up with it and decided to fix it for good.

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