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.