Special activities

Special heat treatment

In order to better meet customer needs as well as to ensure perfect repeatability of product quality, OSBORN METALS, specialist in special cold-drawn steel profiles and tubes, has several internal heat treatment facilities to cover a maximum of applications.

Our heat treatment equipment is made up of several furnaces with very specific performances:

• Closed furnace under controlled atmosphere
• Open furnace
• Induction heat treatment furnace
• Laboratory furnace

All of these means are of course adapted to the long lengths of tubes and profiles cold drawn by OSBORN METALS.

The role of the furnaces in cold drawing
Although antithetical by definition to the idea of “cold”, the heat treatment is an integral part of the cold drawing busines.

Indeed, different treatments can be applied to tubes, bars and profiles throughout the process for several reasons:
Carry out simple stress relieves between two drawing passes to relax the internal stresses of the steel hardened during the previous cold drawing step.
Carry out normalization at the end of the cycle in order to eliminate all residual stresses in the material.
Carry out various specific treatments (such as quenching + tempering) to target a specific range of parameters imposed by customer needs such as resistance (Rm, Rp0.2), elongation (A%) or even hardness.