Metal Working: History, Progress, Significance, Techniques, Application In Daily Life


Metals are everywhere. Our appliances at our houses, the furniture in our offices, and the other structures that we see each time we go outside, all these things are entirely or partly made of metal. This just goes to show how big of a part metals play in our lives.

The process of metal working began a lots of years ago. Even pre-historic men are thought to have practiced this technique. Even if it's a bit difficult 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 ancient men if they didn't have metal equipments to use for their cooking, hunting, and any other activities. They were able to make sharp tools and knives out of pieces of rocks and metals. Since then, the entire thing has developed into something more sophisticated.

Normally, there're three 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 transform an object by applying pressure, heat, or mechanical force. There are many kinds of forming processes and many of them are: plastic deforming, casting, and sheet metal forming. Under sheet metal forming, you would get bending, roll forming, spinning, drawing, rolling, stamping, shearing, raising and decambering.

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

3. Joining - examples of joining processes 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. When the filler metal comes into contact with the work pieces, it would harden and create a tough and sturdy joint. It's almost the same as soldering, but the previous is done at temperature more than 450 degrees Celsius. Soldering is performed at temperatures below 450 degrees Celsius. In welding, materials are joined by thermoplastics or metals. The work pieces are melted and are therefore added to the filler substance so some sort of a molten material pool is created. This would then be left to cool to form a strong joint.

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