What Advantages Does Roll Forming Offer
Roll forming has a number of advantages over press braking and extruding. Compared to brake forming, roll forming can produce more parts with greater uniformity and consistency in one run. Roll forming also eliminates the need for multiple stage operations, while reducing the amount of waste material by eliminating trim scrap and slitting burrs.
When compared to metal extrusion, roll forming allows for the use of practically all metals while also eliminating the need for secondary operations like notching, punching, and post painting by combining them with the roll forming process.
Steel can be prepainted and perforated prior to roll forming in order to reduce the secondary processes needed to form a part. The ability to fabricate decorative parts from precoated, prepainted, or pre-plated metal is also a distinct feature of roll forming.
Assembly
Two distinct parts can be run together to form one assembly.
Clad Shapes
Two different materials can be formed simultaneously to produce a clad shape in one operation.
Energy Efficiency
Roll forming is an energy efficient process that usually requires no process heating to be added when shaping a part.
Finish Roll
Forming can produce superior surface finishes, while maintaining sharp, clean contours. The absence of die marks left on the material often eliminates the need for any additional finishing.
Hole and Slot
Patterns Pre-punching in-line allows holes or slots that cannot be done as a secondary operation because of their location or features of the part to be included in the shape.
Hollow Shapes
Hollow or semi-hollow shapes can be produced with thinner walls than are possible by competing processes.
Lengths
Parts can be roll formed at almost unlimited lengths. At Samson Roll Formed Products company, we can produce parts of any length as long as they meet the constraints of our space, our material handling equipment, and our shipping capabilities.
Material
Almost any bendable material can be roll formed.
Production
The high speed, continuous nature of roll forming lends itself to economic production of large volumes of parts.
Secondary Operations
Many additional operations, such as punching, notching, welding, and bending, that otherwise would have to be performed as secondary operations can be incorporated into the roll forming process, thus reducing handling and processing costs. Even labels giving installation instructions can be applied to the shape as an in-line process.
Structural Applications
Roll formed parts generally have the advantage in structural rigidity when compared to parts formed through competing processes.
Tolerances
Roll forming can be used to achieve close tolerance when forming multiple parts, allowing for the manufacturing of uniform parts over multiple runs.
Tooling
The same tooling can be used to roll identical shapes out of a variety of materials
Uniformity
Roll forming produces symmetrical parts with uniform dimensions that assure precision fits, simplify production, speed assembly, and minimize rejects.
