HISTORY OF SHAPING PROCESS

Rolling Process;
In 1890, a technical breakthrough was achieved with the brothers’
invention of the pilger rolling process. The name was taken from the
analogous Luxembourg Echternach pilgrims’ procession, as during the
rolling process the prepierced thick-walled steel ingot was moved forward
and backward and turned at the same time in order to be stretched into a
thin-walled tube. The combination of the pilger and the cross-rolling
processes became known as the Mannesmann process .The history of
Mannesmann began five years before the company’s founding with a
major technical achievement. In 1885, the brothers Reinhard and Max
Mannesmann invented a rolling process for the manufacture of thick-
walled seamless steel tubes, the so-called cross-rolling process, at their
father’s file factory in Remscheid. Introducing the invention, they founded
tube mills between 1887 and 1889 with several different business
partners, in Bous on the Saar (in the Bohemian Komotau), in Landore,
Wales, and at home in Remscheid. The machine building industry was
unable to supply the necessary plant for the application of the rolling
process, and the iron and steel industry was not able to provide the
necessary supplies of high-quality semi-finished products. As a result,
numerous other inventions had to be made and long years of experiments
passed before the initial difficulties in the industrial exploitation of the new
process were overcome.

Forging Process
The forgesmiths of the 19th century were particularly skilled at hand and
open die forging of wrought iron. As wrought iron was only produced in
heats of 50 kilograms, the smiths became skillful in hammer welding and
many large shaft forgings weighing 10 tonnes and more were gradually
built up by a process of forging and hammer welding. The invention of the
Bessemer steel making process in 1856 was a major breakthrough for the
ferrous forging industry. The forgers now had a plentiful supply of low cost
steel for production of volume quantities of forgings. It has been accepted
that the first cavity steel forgings using a closed die process commenced
in the United States in 1862 for production of components for the Colt
revolver.
Casting Process
The metal casting of metal is a prehistoric technology, but one that appears
relatively late in the archaeological record.There were many earlier fire-using
technologies, collectively called by Wertime pyrotechnology, which provided a
basis for the development of metal casting. Among these were the heat
treatment of stone to make it more workable, the burning of lime to make
plaster, and the firing of clay to produce ceramics. At first, it did not include
smelting, for the metal of the earliest castings appears to have been native.

The earliest objects now known to have been have of metal are more than
10,000 years old and were

wrought, not cast. They are small, decorative pendants and beads, which were
hammered to shape from nuggets of native copper and required no joining. The
copper was beaten flat into the shape of leaves or was rolled to form small
tubular beads. The archaeological period in which this metalworking took place
was the Neolithic, beginning some time during the Aceramic Neolithic, before the
appearance of pottery in the archaeological record.

Native metals were then perhaps considered simply another kind of stone, and
the methods that had been found useful in shaping stone were attempted with
metal nuggets. It seems likely that the copper being worked was also being
annealed, because this was a treatment that already being given store. Proof of
annealing could be obtained from the microstructures of these early copper
artifacts were it not for their generally corroded condition (some are totally
mineralized) and the natural reluctance to use destructive methods in studying
very rare objects.

The appearance of plasters and ceramics in the Neolithic period is evidence that
the use of fire was being extended to materials other than stone. Exactly when
the casting of metals began is not known. Archaeologists give the name
Chalcolithic to the period in which metals were first being mastered and the date
this period, which immediately preceded the Bronze Age, very approximately to
between 5000 and 3000 B.C. Analyses of early cast axes and other objects give
chemical compositions consistent with their having been cast from native copper
and are the basis for the conclusion that the melting of metals had been
mastered before smelting was developed. The furnaces were rudimentary. It has
been shown by experiment that it was possible to smelt copper, for example, in a
crucible. Nevertheless, the evidence for casting demonstrates an increasing
ability to manage and direct fire in order to achieve the required melting
temperatures. The fuel employed was charcoal, which tended to supply a
reducing atmosphere where the fire was enclosed in an effort to reduce the loss
of heat. Smelting followed.

The molds were of stone (Fig. 1). The tradition of stone carving was longer than
any of the pyrotechnologies, and the level of skill allowed very finely detailed
work. The stone carved was usually of a smooth texture such as steatite or
andesite, and the molds produced are themselves often very fine objects, which
can be viewed in museums and archaeological exhibitions. Many are open molds,
although they were not necessarily intended for flat objects. Elaborate filigree for
jewelry was cast in open molds and then shaped by bending into bracelets and
headpieces, or cast in parts and

then assembled. Certain molds, described by the archaeologist as multifaceted,

have cavities carved in each side of a rectangular block of stone. Such
multifaceted molds would have been more portable than separate ones and
suggest itinerant founding, but they may simply represent economy in the use of
a suitable piece of stone.