What is Cold Heading?
What is cold heading?
Cold heading is one of the pressure processing with little or non-cutting metal. Cold heading is a metalworking process that creates plastic deformation of metal with molds (almost a male die such as a punch, and a female die such as a heading die) under the action of external force. The process typically forms the required parts or blanks.
Cold heading is perfect for the production of bolts, screws, nuts, rivets, pins and other standard fasteners.
What materials are used in cold heading?
There are an extensive range of material options for cold heading, such as alloy steels, aluminum, brass, bronze, copper, stainless steel, nickel alloys, and so on.Of course, cold heading materials need to meet the following requirements:
1.High plasticity and low hardness
Due to the tangential tensile stress on the side surface of the blank during cold heading, it is easy to cause longitudinal surface cracks. Therefore, the materials with high plasticity and low hardness should be used in cold heading process.
2.High surface quality
Because the cold heading process is mainly used for the production of standard parts, these parts are generally no longer cutting, especially standard fasteners such as screws and bolts. Their shanks are almost un-deformed in the cold heading process with maintaining the surface of the blank. Therefore, the raw materials used for cold heading must be low surface roughness and without surface defects such as scratches, pitting, rust, and so on.
3.High accuracy
In order to ensure the accuracy of the blank, the tolerance of the blank must be very small.
What are the advantages of cold heading?
There are a number of advantages of using the cold heading process to form fasteners, including:
- Cold heading is carried out at room temperature. It can improve the mechanical properties of metal parts.
- Cold heading can improve the utilixation rate of material. For example, the material utilization rate of cold heading nuts can reach about 80%, while the rate of cutting nuts is only 54%.
- Cold heading can greatly improve productivity. For example, the productivity of cold heading nuts is about 25 to 30 times higher than that of the cutting process.
- Benefit from the use of multi-station cold heading machine, each process is simultaneously processed on a machine tool, thereby reducing equipment investment, reducing the production site, reducing the transportation of semi-finished products among the various processes, reducing the labor intensity, and improving the working conditions.
- Cold heading can improve product surface finish and ensure product accuracy. The accuracy can be guaranteed for the mass production of screws, bolts, nuts, etc.
With good mechanic properties, high material utilization rate, high productivity, lower production costs, and good product quality, cold heading is increasingly used in machinery manufacturing, especially in the production of standard fasteners. The representative products produced by multi-station cold heading machine are screws, bolts, and nuts.
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