Special cold drawn profiles

Key Benefits

Cold drawing is a metal deformation process that makes it possible to obtain, in one or more cold drawing steps and thanks to a die (for the external shape of the profile or the bar), complex sections with excellent precision.

Manufactured in long lengths, the profiles are most often cut to the size of your parts ; this is how the use of cold drawn profiles can lead to considerable savings compared to other processes for manufacturing mechanical parts such as machining, broaching, foundry, sintering.

Variety in complexity
Osborn Metals offers a wide variety of complex shaped profiles :

• Solid sections or standard profiles : obtained by deformation of standard profiles in order to obtain shapes such as strips, squares, rectangles, rounds, ½ rounds, etc.
• Solid sections or special and complex profiles : obtained by deformation of profiles of already complex shape, themselves manufactured to measure by extrusion or hot rolling such as teardrop profiles, hinges, I-shaped profiles, etc.
• Open sections : obtained by deformation of metal plates or strips or from profiling such as U-shaped profiles, slides, stainless steel stair nosings, etc.

Part of Osborn Metals’ know-how lies in the choice of the proper raw material and in the design of the dies leading economically to the desired finished section.


High precision
Thanks to the cold deformation of the material, the cold drawing allows in one or more steps to achieve the requested complex shape with dimensional tolerances very close to those usually obtained by machining.
Tolerances usually of type h11 or h10 can be tightened according to customer needs and reach +/- 0.02 mm on certain dimensions.
These tolerances, which are directly those of the finished product, eliminate machining operations on the section.
Furthermore, by the very nature of the process, tolerances are guaranteed over the entire length of the tube, without variation.

Original sections
Cold drawing makes it possible to produce sections that would be technically or financially unfeasible with other processes :

• original shapes allowing you to “personalize” your products at no extra cost
• sharp corners or sharp edges
• complex sections in a single part, replacing several assembled sections (reduction in the number of parts and assembly costs).

Material savings
Saving material is linked to the cold drawing process itself, which consists of deforming the material and not removing chips.
The material savings compared to a machined solution are :

• savings coming from the ratio of masses between finished product/raw product
• no rework of machining, the final tolerances being directly obtained by cold drawing.

The savings, thus made by cold drawing, are all the greater as the base material is expensive.

Low tooling costs
Tooling costs for a set of drawing die and mandrel are very modest compared to tooling costs for forging, casting or cold rolling.
The existence of an in-house tool workshop allows us to be particularly flexible with regards to changes to the dies and mandrel, and responsive for the production of prototypes.

Quantities adapted to your needs
The cold drawing process is particularly economical when the quantities used are high (a few tons), but it remains competitive for quantities of around 500 kg.
For recurring deliveries of profiles, Osborn Metals is able to manage buffer stock and supply exactly the quantities required.
Osborn Metals also knows how to adapt to making very small quantities in order to reduce material waste.