Accurate and professional draw drown service.
A drawdown process is a process of resizing a pipe’s diameter. The steel pipe passes through our speciaised drawdown machines to compress the tube according to specification. Depending on the wall thickness of the pipe, we are able to reduce the size by 12mm. We are able to draw down a tube size of up to 300 square meters.
The drawdown size is made specifically to meet our client’s needs. This process is managed with care by our team of experts on-site in our 4000m2 warehouse.
We get asked numerous questions being in the steel manufacturing industry but one that we get asked most frequently is ‘Why does the tubing that is being drawn down end up being different lengths?”
Well, lets unpack this for you.
Steel is an alloy, which means that it is a combination of more than one component and varying the composition of individual constituents may affect their properties in different ways.
While Iron makes up most of the steel alloy, it is the other metals that significantly affect how the steel ‘behaves’ when being machined, for example, iron itself is soft with very little industrial use as an engineering material, however, with the addition of carbon, it helps strengthen and harden steel making it far more useful.
Carbon steel is responsible for about 90% of total steel production today, however when machining carbon steel we need to take a few things into consideration.
Steel, like people, react differently to different treatments.
Heat treatment thickens steel and cold treatment elongates it.
Elongation of the steel pipe when put through a draw down machine is as common as getting wet when you touch water, it is part of the process.
The amount of elongation that happens in the machining process is dependent on the amount of carbon that the steel contains. Elongation is greater on a CQ pipe (Commercial quality steel) than it is on 355 materials where the chemical properties are much more controlled.
To make it easier to understand, imagine you are feeling particularly adventurous and decide to make pizza…..first you need to roll out the dough, right…..or you will be getting bread rolls instead of pizza, well when you take your rolling pin to that dough ball every roll stretches the dough out to achieve the size and shape you need, it’s the same with machining a diameter of a steel tube, the extra ‘dough’ of the steel has to go somewhere, hence the elongation.
the principal is the same, however the taste I’m sure would be vastly different.
