Spur has been meeting the roll bonding needs of our customers for over 30 years. We have the experience to make your toughest metal connections.

The Science

Roll bonding is the process of passing two or more stacked sheets, plates or strips through a pair of higher pressure rollers. The large rolling forces cause significant deformation to the materials and reduce their thickness. The resulting bond between the materials is created by interfacial mechanical and atomic affinity. The two or more materials are permanently bonded together.

The Process

The process of roll bonding starts with mechanical and/or chemical cleaning of the bonding surfaces. Materials are heated to an optimal temperature depending upon the materials being joined and target bond strength. The materials are stacked and sent through the rollers. The resulting bonded unit is flattened via a secondary process along with any annealing. The flat strip is cut to desired lengths and fabricated or machined to customer specifications.

Capabilities

At spur we do both hot and cold rolling of many different materials including, steel, aluminum, copper and titanium. Our proprietary and patent pending process gives us us the ability to bond a wide range of alloys, thicknesses and widths. Unlike most bonding processes, we are able to bond different width materials such as joining strip to plate.

Advantages

The roll bonded interface in our clad products is consistently flatter and more uniform than explosion bonded claddings and this allows us to accurately locate the bond interface prior to machining. As a result, we are able to produce products to tighter tolerances and at a lower cost than other clad metal manufacturers.

Testing

To assure that the products we deliver meet our customer’s expectations, we carefully control our manufacturing processes and verify that the controls are operating through a rigorous testing program. For bonded materials, we utilize a 90 degree bend test at the bond interface. This is a proven indicator of the bond strength. This test is conducted at intervals to document the quality of the bond over the entire length of the production unit.

We maintain a small test facility capable of tensile, shear, and heat testing of our materials. We also offer ultrasonic inspection, vacuum leak testing, high power microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and conductivity testing to meet customer requirements on request and for our product research and development efforts. We also track chemical and metallurgical certifications and certificates of origin on our raw materials.