Nobody's Perfect...

We know that both skill and practice makes our products perfect and avoids common forging defects. Our talented employees work hard to make sure all forgings that leave our shop are of superior quality and meet all client specifications. However, in the forging process, defects sometimes happen. A skilled forging workforce like Anderson Shumaker’s knows and takes the necessary measures to take to prevent forging defects. Today we’ll talk about a few of the most common defects that we work hard to avoid.

Common Forging Defects

Warping: Warping happens when thinner sections of a forging cool faster than the remainder of the material. Warping distorts the piece, making it hard to use. Luckily, warping is easy to avoid with proper heat treating and careful forging techniques.
Cracking: Excessive or improper stress during the forging process can cause material to crack either externally or internally. Sometimes cracks are caused by high thermal gradients during manufacturing, and other times by poorly designed forging dies or the use of excess material. We prevent cracking by making sure our forging dies are superior quality and by employing forging masters who have vast experience in working with different types of metals, sizes, and processes.
Improper Grain Flow: This usually occurs when an improper die design is used. Improper grain flow can affect a finished piece’s impact toughness, strength, and ductility. At Anderson Shumaker, we’re masters of grain-flow. We work hard to make sure each piece is forged on proper dies at correct strengths maximize this important feature.
Folds: This occurs when metal buckles during the forging process. Sometimes it happens when there is not enough metal in the piece. Our years of experience working with forgings of varying sizes helped us develop in-house procedures to prevent folds.

Before any piece is forged at Anderson Shumaker, we take great measures to carefully consider each piece’s design, the material volume, the forging dies, and the process from start to finish. We also use extensive in-house testing to make sure everything we forge meets all requirements and expectations. While nobody is perfect, we try our best to be perfect in every way, and we guarantee our customers will never receive a defective forging.