The cold drawing process uses hot rolled steel bar or rod coil as raw stock material. As the hot rolled bar or coil stock is pulled through a carbide die, the die compresses and elongates the material around the centerline. The advantages of the PRECISION KIDD STEEL cold drawing process for our customers include.

Click here to view an infographic depicting key steps in the process.

Prep

Because hot rolled products are produced at elevated temperatures (1700 – 2200 Deg. F. i.e. hot rolling), they generally have a rough and scaled surface and may also exhibit variations in section and size.

To prepare raw stock for cold drawing, we clean, lubricate and point the material:

• Cleaning: Abrasive scale (iron oxide) on the surface of the hot rolled rough stock is removed.
• Coating: The surface of the bar or coil is coated with a drawing lubricant to aid cold drawing.
• Pointing: Several inches of the lead ends of the bar or coil are reduced in size by swaging or extruding so that it can pass freely through the drawing die. Note: This is done because the die opening is always smaller than the original bar or coil section size.

Cold Drawing

In the cold drawing process, the material being drawn is at room temperature (i.e. Cold-Drawn). The pointed/reduced end of the bar or coil, which is smaller than the die opening, is passed through the die where it enters a gripping device of the drawing machine. The drawing machine pulls or draws the remaining unreduced section of the bar or coil through a standard or custom die. The die reduces the cross section of the original bar or coil, shapes the profile of the product and increases the length of the original product.

The drawn product, which is referred to as Cold Drawn or Cold Finished, exhibits a bright and/or polished finish, increased mechanical properties, improved machining characteristics and precise and uniform dimensional tolerances.

Multi-Pass Drawing

The cold drawing of complex steel shapes/profiles may require that each bar/coil be drawn several times in order to produce the desired shape and tolerances. This process is called multi-pass drawing and involves drawing the material through smaller and smaller die openings. Material is generally annealed between each drawing pass to remove cold work and to increase ductility.

Annealing

This is a thermal treatment generally used to soften the material being drawn, to modify the microstructure, the mechanical properties and the machining characteristics of the steel and/or to remove internal stresses in the product. Depending on the desired characteristics of the finished product, annealing may be used before, during (between passes) or after the cold drawing operation, depending on material requirements.

Click here to view annealing chart.

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