Custom Steel forging is commonly used in mechanical and industrial applications due to its strength, availability, and specialized alloys like stainless and carbon steel. Forgings in steel offer unsurpassed resilience for manufacturing parts that simply must not fail.

>> Custom Steel Forging Benefits

50. Custom steel forged parts offer a high degree of reliability and tolerance capabilities.
50. Custom steel forgings offer uniformity of composition and structure. With many metal forgings made from one “heat” of steel, steel forgings have minimum variation in machinability and mechanical properties.
50. Custom forged steel parts are stronger and more reliable than machined or cast parts due to the fact that the grain flow of the steel is altered, conforming to the part’s shape. Grain flow strengthening in steel forgings is analogous to the cross grain strength of wood.
50. Custom steel forged parts make possible designs that accommodate high loads and stresses. Forgings are free from internal gas pockets, voids, or cooling defects that can cause unexpected fatigue or impact load failure. Custom Steel forgings are used when quality cannot be questioned.
50. Steel forging is the application of thermal and mechanical energy to steel bars, billets, and ingots to cause the material to change shape while in the solid state. This is a different process than casting, where metal is melted and poured into a mold in the liquid or molten state.

>> Custom Steel Forging Process

Steel, especially when heated to forging temperature, is ductile and malleable; able to be shaped by applying pressure. With proper processing methods, custom forging allows a billet of steel to be shaped permanently without cracking, due to its plasticity.

Custom steel forging requires an induction heating system, forge furnace or oven to heat the steel to sufficient temperature such that work hardening or strain hardening will not result from the deformation process. Metallurgical recrystallization and grain refinement result from the thermal cycle and the deformation process. This strengthens the resulting steel product, particularly in terms of impact toughness.

Steel strength refers to compressive strength (compressing without crushing), tensile strength (pulling without breaking) and shear strength (the ability to avoid breaking allowing two pieces to slide past one another). The term shear strength is sometimes interchanged with the term impact toughness, although test methods may differ.