Cold Rolled Steel Tubes: The Backbone of Modern Machinery

Cold rolled steel tube is a kind of precision steel tube and can be either welded or seamless. 

Cold rolled steel tubes normally have very tight OD and ID tolerance, and the surface are bright and smooth.  

There are many advantages of cold rolled tubes comparing with other type of tubes, like hot rolled pipes or cold drawn tubes:

1.   Very tight OD&ID tolerance can be controlled through cold rolling. 

2.  Cold rolling can improve the concentricity better,comparing with cold drawing. 

3.  Cold rolled tubes have perfect surface, bright and smooth, and roughness can be like 0.8um max. In application, cold rolling dominates in production of small size precision tubes with thin wall.

4.  In production of precision steel tubes with super heavy wall, cold rolling is highly efficienct. 

There are also disadvantages of cold rolled steel tubes:

1.   Due to high deformation (wall thickness reduction), cold rolled tubes have very high tensile but low elongation. So, cold rolled tubes are always heat treated after cold rolling. 

2.   The low production efficiency in normal sizes,comparing with cold drawing. 

3.   The OD may be not consistent, although it is very small, because the tube was cold rolled stage by stage. Unlike cold drawing, a piece of cold drawn tube was fabricated with a continuous cold drawing process without pause.  

Anyway, cold rolling is widely used in production of small size thin wall tubes, thick wall tubes, and alloy steel tubes.