Metal Working: Historical Past, Improvement, Significance, Techniques, Application In Everyday Life

By Erina Array

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Metals are everywhere. Our appliances at our houses, the furniture in our offices, and the other structures that we see every time we go outside, 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 started a lots of years ago. Even pre-historic men are believed to have practiced this technique. Even if it is a little bit difficult to trace how exactly metal working started, possibly 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 any other activities. They were able to make sharp equipments and knives out of pieces of rocks and metals. Since then, the whole thing has progressed into something more advanced.

Generally, there're three different types of metal working. They are cutting, joining and forming. Each 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 types of forming processes and many of them are: plastic deforming, casting, & 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 modify its physical look. The material would normally be cut into 2 pieces, the waste part and the finished part. Cutting has several sub-processes together with machining, burning, drilling, threading, turning, grinding, and filing.

3. Joining - examples of joining processes are brazing, soldering and welding. In brazing, you would require to melt a filler metal and turn 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 hard and sturdy joint. It's nearly the similar as soldering, but the former is done at temperature more 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 sort of a molten material pool is formed. This would then be left to cool to form a sturdy joint.