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A beginner's guide to metal hardness

5/29/2015

3 Comments

 
Terms covered in this blog post:
Heat treating
Tempering
Rockwell
Tensile strength
You may hear the term heat treating and wonder when we use it. While heat treating can be used to clean metal and for other reasons, it's also used to harden metal. We use heat treating to harden our tooling. Heat and metal combine to provide us with the hardness, durability, and sharpness needed to blank and form your metal parts.

Hardness can bring about brittleness. That's where you'll hear the term tempering. Tempering involves heating the steel to a set temperature while sacrificing some hardness. 

You might hear the term Rockwell. Rockwell is a hardness scale. When we get steel, we get it in a set hardness that works for the blanking and forming of your metal parts.

There's one more term you might hear related to metal hardness. That's tensile strength. Tensile strength refers to the maximum stress that material can handle.

There's your beginner's guide to metal hardness. We take care of these considerations for you when we develop your part with you.
3 Comments
Alex Trodder link
3/18/2016 03:23:49 pm

Knowing the Rockwell scale can be a great asset to knowing how durable your tools will be or how well something might hold an edge. For many applications, it's important to have parts or tools tempered to helps relax the metallic grain structure. This is what makes it so they aren't so brittle, as you mentioned. I've heard that being able to balance flexibility and hardness is an essential factor to making great tools and parts. Thanks for your post.

Reply
mike angelle link
6/25/2018 09:16:01 am

No comments.
One question. Is there a reference that identifies the difference of hardness for various components? example shaft to a sleeve set screw that mounts the sleeve to the shaft?
1. How much difference in hardness for the shaft relative to the
hardness of the sleeve set screw?
Example 4140 shaft material surface hardened to 35 HRC.
What reference would identify the hardness of the sleeve mounting screw?
Is this sleeve set screw hardness determined by experience?
Your assistance please.

Thanks

Reply
Eli Richardson link
2/17/2021 11:02:51 am

It really helped when you explained heat treating it's a way to harden a metal. Last week, the whole family got together, and one of my uncles said he was interested in investing in an automotive business. He wants to get more familiar with all the procedures and terms used in that industry, so I think this article will be of great help for him. I appreciate you helping me learn more about different metal heating and hardening terms.

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​Grinding Wheel Industry
   Abrasive wheel inserts
   Cup wheel (spider) bushings
   Disc wheel inserts
   Reducing adapter bushings
   Reusable adapter kits
   Safety backs
   Throw-away mounting flanges
   Threaded hex inserts

Wire Rope Industry
   Fractional sheave gauges
   Metric sheave gauges
   How to use a sheave gauge
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Donahue Industries, Inc. is a full service international metal stamping manufacturer in Massachusetts specializing in parts for the grinding wheel and wire rope industries. 

Donahue Industries, Inc.
5 Industrial Drive
Shrewsbury, MA  01545-5835

Phone: (001) 508-845-6501
Fax: (001) 508-842-7665
sales@donahueindustries.com