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Cold Forming - Cold Heading
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Cold heading is a cold forming process that essentially involves applying force with a punch to the end of a metal blank contained in a die. The force must exceed the metal’s elastic limit (yield strength) to cause plastic flow. You might consider cold heading a forging operation without heat. Heading, which includes upsetting and extruding, is often performed in conjunction with other cold forming operations such as sizing, piercing, trimming, thread rolling, blank rolling and pointing.
Upsetting, a term used synonymously with heading, means to form a head on a fastener, or a bulge in a cylindrical part being headed. Extruding means either decreasing the diameter of the blank by pushing it through a hole, or punching a hole in the center of the blank and allowing the metal to flow backward over the punch. In both cases, the volume of the metal blank remains constant; it is merely reshaped by upsetting or extruding.
Heading is a metalworking process that goes back before the turn of the 20th century and for many years was used only to produce simple fasteners. Today heading is a high-speed, automated and multi-station operation that is capable of producing not only increasingly complex metal fasteners economically, but a growing variety of other components, including some that are asymmetrical. Combined with this dramatic improvement in heading equipment is the ability to successfully cold form parts from tougher metals, including stainless steels and high temperature alloys.
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