Metals are materials that have a wide range of uses and there are such a huge variety of them, it is easy to find a suitable metal for any purpose – whether you are building a house or constructing a cutting edge spaceship. Metals have long played a part in the way that we live. Since the Bronze age humans worked out how useful metals could be, making items like tools, weapons and crockery to name but a few things that metal quickly got put to use for!
In those days of course, the process of obtaining metal, as well as the types of metal available were very different to today. Modern technology and scientific advances saw mental being put to use as a crucial part of the industrial revolution, as well as in conflict, when the first and second world war saw technological advances as weapons and machinery were created using metals.
Often, when we are making things from metal, we need to be able to shape and bend them to fit in with the design of whatever we are constructing. This is an important part of using metals, as they are useless if we cannot get them into the required shape, size and form. In the olden days, a tiring process of hammering and cutting metals meant that it was much harder to do this. However, modern technology and equipment like these Euromac bending machines cotswold-machinery-sales.co.uk/euromac-bending-machines/horizontal-bending-machines/ means that it is much easier today to make a wide range of items relatively easily from a range of different metals.
Some metals are much easier to bend than others – the properties of metals are one of the main things to be taken into consideration when designing something made from metal, or with metal components. For example, alloy metals are much more difficult to bend, and often, heat will also be required in order to bend them. Of course, the fact that these metals are hard to bend can be a positive when making certain things, so it is worth putting in the effort to bend them into shape. Generally, alloy metals are the ones that are much harder to bend. This is because at an atomic level, they are made up of many different sized atoms, which then means that layers of atoms do not easily slide over the others.
