Talking About Industrial Equipment and Supplies

Pre-fabricated steel buildings are durable, versatile and inexpensive, making them ideal for a wide variety of industrial and commercial applications. However, any steel building is only as strong and stable as the fasteners that are used to assemble it, and fasteners manufactured using traditional thread cutting techniques often leave a lot to be desired.

If your business manufactures fasteners for steel building construction, switching from thread cutting to thread forming processes can bring substantial benefits. Here are three reasons why thread forming tools and inserts are a solid investment for any steel building fastener manufacturer:

Thread Rolling Produces Stronger Fasteners

To create a steel building fastener using thread cutting processes, a piece of metal must be meticulously cut and shaped into the correct dimensions using lathes and other fabrication tools. Unfortunately, this process disrupts the grain of the metal used to create your fasteners, which can significantly reduce the strength and durability of your finished products.

To create fasteners using thread forming processes, a piece of metal rolling stock is inserted between a set of forming dies, which use immense pressure and rotational force to extrude the metal into the correct shape and dimensions. As a result, the metal grain of a rolled fastener will follow the contours of the fastener itself, with no breaks or disruptions.

By modifying the grain of the fastener metal rather than disrupting it, thread rolling produces fasteners with significantly more tensile strength than thread-cut fasteners. This makes thread rolling ideal for steel building fasteners, which usually have to bear significant loads.

Thread Rolling Is Faster

Manufacturing fasteners using thread cutting processes is a multi-step process, which requires a variety of different metal forming and milling tools. This makes thread cutting a relatively time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and a single fastener will often make several passes through a production line before it meets specifications.

By contrast, creating fasteners using thread rolling processes only requires a single set of forming dies. The process is also a lot more precise than thread cutting, and rolled building fasteners are almost always ready to use after a single pass through the forming dies.

As a result, thread rolling is usually significantly faster than thread cutting, allowing manufacturers to create metal building fasteners with very little lead time. Switching to thread rolling can be especially useful for larger manufacturers, who may need to fulfill bulk steel building fastener orders at short notice.

Thread Rolling Is More Cost-Effective

Thread cutting is a relatively wasteful process. The small fragments of metal that are chipped away from the cutting stock to create a fastener usually cannot be reused or recycled in any meaningful way. Relying on thread cutting can therefore increase your material costs, and the amount of wastage involved isn't exactly eco-friendly. 

Thread forming, on the other hand, creates a negligible amount of metal waste, since metal does not have to be cut or chipped away from the stock at any point in the process. This also means that rolling stock is smaller in diameter than cutting stock, making it cheaper and easier to store and transport the raw materials used to create your fasteners.

Contact a supplier, such as a LMT Fette tools supplier, to learn more.