Sheet metal work is widely used in construction. It helps produce metals used for wings on planes, roods on houses, bodies for cars, and the like. Aside from these large items, it is also widely used on smaller things like in computer housing or decorative lamp shadings. There are many other goods that also make use of items that are derived from metalworking.

Basic Understanding
Anyone who is interested to do metal work has to learn all about this process. It is important to understand the impact of the material used in the process and how it is used as well. The people doing the metal work are usually the people supplying items for a major company, a craftsman working in his small backyard, or a contractor working on orders from clients. Metal working is the process of making sheets and other items out of metals. Though not all types of metals can be used, many of them can actually contribute to the metalworking.

Material Description
Knowing the materials used in metalworking is important for any craftsman. In fact, the grade of the material must be known before work should even start. Grade refers to the characteristics of metals like its chemical purity, corrosion resistance, hardness, and weather resistance. These are important characteristics to be assessed before any metal should be processed. The grade can be identified by looking for the word “Grade” followed by some letters or numbers. The common grades found in metals are Grade 316, Grade 304, and Grade 410. Each designation can be checked to see the specific characteristics of the metal. Aside from these characteristics, gauge should not be forgotten. This measures the thickness of the material and uses a number for every designation. Due to the number being unitless, a chart is needed to determine just what the corresponding gauge is. For instance, Gauge 3 actually refers to 6.07mm and Gauge 4 to 5.69mm.

Metalworking
While working on metals as the materials in metalworking, there are different processes involved. These processes are necessary to come up with the final product used in many industries. The different processes include the following:

1. Manufacturing or casting. This is the process of putting liquid metal into the mould and waiting for it to solidify. This comes in various types too with foundry as the most common casting process. It is used on copper, steel, bronze, tin and zinc.

2. Welding. This involves putting together metals by welding them. Arc welding, the most common type of welding, is the process of creating an arc using electrodes. This makes use of high temperature to successfully pull off the welding process. It has advances techniques such as laser beam welding and electron beam welding which use light and electrons in the process, respectively.

3. Cutting and shaping. These are the last steps in the process of metalworking. These use different sizes in tools, from manually controlled tools to large ones that are already computer controlled. Lathe is the most common tool for cutting and shaping metals. It works by rotating the metal while the tool shapes it up into whatever you want.

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