Special Tailor-Made Tubes

Key Benefits

As specialists in cold drawing, Osborn Metals can produce for its customers all types of cleverly economical tailor-made tubes for the production of their mechanical parts. We can work with carbon steel, stainless steel, as well as copper based alloys(bronze, brass, etc.).

We provide machining precision without material loss as well as the possibility of producing parts that are very difficult to produce in machining, such as long splined shafts.
Our technical teams can help you to design your products in the interests of costs and CO2 emissions reductions.

All our special and tailor-made tubes are manufactured following the same quality processes as our aeronautical tubes !

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

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

Part of Osborn Metals’ know-how lies in the choice of the proper hollows and in the design of dies and mandrel 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 tubes, 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.