subject: Metal Working: History, Improvement, Importance, Procedures, Use In Daily Life [print this page] Metals are all overMetals are all over. Our home equipments at our homes, the furniture in our workplaces, and the other structures that we see each time we go outside, all of those things are totally or partially made of metal. This just goes to show how big of a part metals play in our lives.
The process of metal working started years and years ago. Even pre-historic men are thought to have practiced this method. Even if it's a little hard to trace how exactly metal working started, maybe we can all agree that it predates history. Think how life it would be like for the ancient men if they didn't have metallic tools to use for their cooking, hunting, and 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 advanced.
Normally, there're three different types of metal working which 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 transform an object by using pressure, heat, or mechanical force. There're various kinds of forming processes and some of them are: plastic deforming, casting, and sheet metal forming. Under sheet metal forming, you will get bending, roll forming, spinning, drawing, rolling, stamping, shearing, raising and decambering.
2. Cutting - it's done by removing some part of a material to modify its physical appearance. The material would generally 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 change it into a capillary to assemble at least 2 work pieces. Once the filler metal comes into contact with the work pieces, it would harden and create a hard and powerful joint. It is nearly the same as soldering, but the former is done at temperature greater than 450 degrees Celsius. Soldering is performed at temperatures lower than 450 degrees Celsius. In welding, materials are joined by thermoplastics or metals. The work pieces are melted and are then added to the filler material so some kind of a molten material pool is formed. This would then be left to cool to form a strong joint.
