Who are we

RECOMMENDING THE BEST MATERIAL FOR THE JOB

As one of Europe's leading manufacturers of precision pressings with plants in the West Midlands and Slovakia, Clamason Industries (www.clamason.co.uk) uses its experience and expertise to provide the optimum steel or non-ferrous metal solution for each project and application.

Individual pressings can be produced from materials ranging from cold-rolled and stainless steels to copper based alloys, aluminium and bimetallic combinations - selecting from hundreds if not thousands of grades to comply with the characteristics required and conditions of use specified, so the choice can be extremely perplexing to the engineering designer who comes to Clamason with initial suggestions for a design and material.

Clamason Industries has always been closely involved from the start of a project in productionising customers' component design proposals whilst taking account of outside toolmakers' modifications. Productionising components often entails changing the material specified to one better fit-for-purpose, more cost-effective or more easily available.

A metal may be specified for its cost, weight, mechanical and physical properties, shelf life, recyclability and so forth. Mechanical properties will encompass tensile strength, yield strength, impact strength, elongation, shear strength, Brinell hardness and fatigue strength, whilst physical properties embrace melting range, density, electrical conductivity and the coefficients of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity.

One of the main problems is that our further education system nowadays teaches engineering design students a great deal about the myriad choices of "modern" plastics but far less about metals, so that emerging designers don't feel confident enough to specify metals over plastics when they go on to join design and project teams and consultancies. What is more, there are a number of well-known 3D solid modelling CAD systems for plastics but not one exists yet for pressings.

Despite such cultural and institutional stumblingblocks, Clamason's precision metal pressings are now fighting back in all sorts of ways against plastics, providing superior solutions in many so-called "traditional" plastics applications. Accordingly, in comparison with metal pressings, plastics may suffer from shrinkage, joint line and RFI / EMI shielding problems, be degraded over time by heat, light and ultraviolet rays and hold lower dimensional tolerances. Then most importantly, unlike plastics, Clamason presswork is recyclable in more than 95% of cases (only plated metals and bimetals being non-recyclable). Clamason sells £600,000 of waste metals for recycling per year, segregated by type into different bins for collection.

Finally, plastic mouldings have a lower perceived value than steel or metals owing to less weight and an inferior look and feel. The last point is an important issue with modern consumer goods, where say a plastic food mixer would be considered more downmarket – and sell for far less – than a professional, all stainless steel version in celebrity TV chef Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen, where stainless steel implies cleanliness and hygiene too. Or an MP3 player in its flimsy, economy plastic case is regarded as rather more disposable than a DVD player with a sturdy metal cover. Indeed, for marketing purposes, many hand-held devices, although encased in plastics, are required to be coated to simulate metal and would be enclosed better by an actual metal pressing. Yet the metallisation of plastics for today’s mobile phone housings, personal stereos and personal data assistants is a notoriously expensive process.

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