What is Cold Rolled steel?
Starting life as Hot Rolled Steel, material is cold rolled, annealed (either batch or Continuous) and then skinpassed to create an array of highly formable or high strength formable steels subject to your requirements. With a cleaner and more unform surface finish these parts can be used for more cosmetic applications and are usually lightly painted by our customer after processing. Due to the annealing process, more formable grades can be achieved enabling our customers to deep draw material when ordering particular grades.
Why CR instead of HR?
Generally HR starts at 1.40 mm minimum thickness so lighter gauges are more generally associated with CR products. Due to the annealing process, the mill have more versatility in the cooling process to produce wither very 'soft' formable products or very strong high strength products allowing end users to reduce thickness (hence weight) whilst retaining strength, particularly in the automotive sector. Also because of the secondary rolling process, the gauge control and profile of the material is much better giving tighter tolerances on gauge and flatness in the finished product.