Cold roll forming is a method of shaping hard metals, such as steels and stainless steels. Very precise, complex cross-sections can be created, and long lengths of these sections can be consistently reproduced. Along each length, features such as holes, slots, or embosses can easily be added, making the roll forming process a very cost effective method of achieving a strong, multi-functional shape. Roll forming is used instead of extrusion, where the metal required cannot easily be extruded, or where the features along the length of the part are uneconomic to add to an extrusion, or where an extrusion is not accurate enough.

Normally, roll forming involves uncoiling a long strip of steel metal, and put it into several stacks of rollers set up in a long line. It is performed at common room temperature, hence the moniker ‘cold’, which is often dropped. Roll forming at room temperature maintains or even improves the properties of the raw material.

Each stack of rollers adds a small additional forming step to the strip, so that by the end of the line, the width of the strip has been formed into the required cross-sectional shape, which can then be cut into the required lengths. The more complex the shape to be formed, the more roller stacks will be have. The finished shape is generally called a roll formed section, a profile or sometimes just a steel tube.

Softer metals would probably use extrusion to create similar shapes, but roll forming comes with distinct advantages over extrusion; not least that hard metals such as steels, including duplex steels and stainless steels, can be very accurately formed into complex profiles, and features can be automatically added along the length of those profiles to add functionality.

For those new to the technology, a single stack of rollers can look similar to an old-fashioned clothes mangel, but with shaped, hardened steel roller tooling rather than flat wooden rollers. Xiamen Bogong Machinery manufactures its own roll forming tooling, and modifies the roll forming machines, so that we can form the metal strip extremely accurately and consistently. According to user's design drawing, we can custom manufatucture roll forming machines accurately.