This edition of the Fastener Training Minute with Carmen Vertullo was originally published August 24, 2014 as “Boron Steel” during episode 85 of Fully Threaded Radio.
Hi, this is Carmen Vertullo bringing you the Fastener Training Minute, and today we’re going to talk about boron steel and it’s important use in Fasteners.
I was recently asked by the Pacific West Fastener Association to talk about this topic at the fall conference. It’s an interesting topic. It’s got some interesting old stuff, some very important new stuff, and it definitely matters to you. So come on back and I’ll tell you why.
Today we’re going to talk about boron steel and why it’s such an important material for fasteners. Most of you probably know over the past decades boron steel got a kind of a bad rap for some undeserved reasons. It’s actually a very important material that helps us to make fasteners cheaper and easier since boron steel allows us to use steel with less carbon to make higher strength Fasteners. One of the Workhorse materials for fasteners is steel called 10B21 or 10B22. It’s a medium carbon steel but actually it could be classified as low-carbon steel. We use it to make product that’s medium strength such as grade 5 or property class 8.8, when we use just a very small amount of boron in the steel.
It makes the tooling last longer when the fasteners are formed and it makes heat treating easier. So we end up with a product that is less expensive overall. Most importantly, we have had some recent specification changes that allow boron steel to be used in some fasteners where it was prohibited before. We’ll be talking about this at our Pacific West Fastener Association fall conference. If you’re interested show up and learn some more stuff about boron steel and why it’s important for fastener manufacturing.
And this is Carmen Vertullo for the Fastener Training Minute. Thank you for listening.