WOW Articles

Metals are everywhere. Our home equipments at our houses, the furniture in our workplaces, and the other structures that we see each time we go outdoors, all of those things are entirely or partially made of metal. This just goes to show how large of a part metals play in our lives.

The process of metal working began years and years ago. Even pre-historic men are thought to have practiced this technique. Even if it's a bit hard to trace how exactly metal working started, perhaps we can all agree that it predates history. Imagine how life it would be like for the prehistoric men if they didn't have metal equipments to use for their cooking, hunting, and any other activities. They were able to make sharp instruments and knives out of pieces of rocks and metals. Since then, the entire thing has progressed into something more sophisticated.

Normally, there're 3 different types of metal working. They are cutting, joining and forming. Every of these three processes even has smaller processes categorized under them.

1. Forming - this is done to deform or modify an object by applying pressure, heat, or mechanical force. There are various types of forming processes and some of them are: plastic deforming, casting, & sheet metal forming. Under sheet metal forming, you would find bending, roll forming, spinning, drawing, rolling, stamping, shearing, raising and decambering.

2. Cutting - it is done by removing some part of a substance to change its physical look. The material would normally be cut into two pieces, the waste part and the finished part. Cutting has a few sub-processes together with machining, burning, drilling, threading, turning, grinding, and filing.

3. Joining - examples of joining operations are brazing, soldering and welding. In brazing, you would need to melt a filler metal and turn it into a capillary to set up minimum 2 work pieces. When the filler metal comes into contact with the work pieces, it would solidify and create a hard and sturdy joint. It's nearly the similar as soldering, but the former is done at temperature greater than 450 degrees Celsius. Soldering is done at temperatures below 450 degrees Celsius. In welding, materials are attached by thermoplastics or metals. The work pieces are melted and are therefore added to the filler material so some kind of a molten material pool is created. This would then be left to cool to form a tough joint.