Despite global economic challenges and market volatility, global steel consumption is expected to continue growing in the coming years. This represents an opportunity for steel suppliers – but seizing this opportunity in a profitable manner may be challenging. Excess capacity and poor solid waste management will limit profit margins and put the focus squarely on optimizing every stage of the supply chain. Masteel is already prepared for the challenges of tomorrow today, with a choice of extremely economic profiling services available to maximize product yields and guarantee steel profiles and sections that meet end-use tolerances and specifications.
In this blog post, Masteel will focus on our flame cutting profiling service and explore how we have improved the performance of a technique that is over a century old to meet today’s steel manufacturing challenges.
Outlining Flame Cutting
Flame cutting is our foundational profiling service, utilising a high-performance oxy-fuel torch to cut metal sheets of between 6 – 170 mm thicknesses across a broad cutting area. We utilise multi-head cutting machines to facilitate both individual and high batch profiling services.
These cutting heads operate using a torch, which burns propane gas to produce a heating flame that elevates the temperature of the steel to its kindling point. A stream of oxygen is projected onto the heated metal, which reacts with the base material to form metal oxides that are rejected as slag. While this generally produces an extremely clean and accurate cut in the steel sheet, it may also result in a heat affected zone (HAZ) that is localised around the cut edge.
This technique has been utilised in one form or another for over 100 years and is primarily suited for profiling carbon and low alloy steels. We have developed a proprietary multi-head flame cutting tool capable of operating over a cutting area of 16000 x 4000 to accurately profile components individually or in batches over a large cutting area. This directly links to AutoCAD to facilitate flame cutting with the utmost accuracy, meeting even the most rudimentary designs within outstanding degrees of tolerance.
Profiling Services and Steel Solutions with Masteel
Our unique flame cutting tools underline our commitment to maximising product yields and tightening tolerances to meet the challenges of a changing marketplace. As mentioned, however, it is no longer enough to simply offer the most advanced tools on the market. We have integrated our profiling services into a tightly controlled supply chain that guarantees the highest quality at every stage. We have cultivated close relationships with local subcontractors to offer rolling services and easy supply of hot-rolled steels that meet your specifications. We also conduct robust quality control and assurance processes to guarantee ISO regulation and end-product quality.
Masteel is the UK’s leading supplier of custom steel profiles and profiling services. We can cut steels exactly to your specifications and can perform a broad range of additional testing parameters to ensure that every profile is suitable for end-use conditions. If you would like to learn about our other profiling services, explore our previous blog posts:
Otherwise, contact us directly with any questions.