We are a company that supplies specialist tubing services to cater for many needs. Our aim is to ensure the tubes are fit for purpose and very high quality. We can alter tubes in many ways. With tube swaging for instance, we can make the inner diameter a different shape while keeping the outside circular.

The stainless steel people use in tubes comes in a myriad of forms. Due to the sheer number of types available, many industries are able to take advantage of them. Of course, you can’t just pick whichever one you want. Your steel needs to have the right characteristics. Read on to discover what you must think about before purchasing.

Will you need to weld?

You should ask yourself whether you need to weld the stainless steel. Welding this variant isn’t the same as working with carbon variants. It can result in issues like stress corrosion and hot cracking, as well as intergranular corrosion.

The most weldable types of stainless steel are the austenitic alloys. If you will be welding the steel, you should use grades like 347 or 304L. The former has niobium stabilisers. They assist with deterring intergranular corrosion. Grade 304L has lower levels of carbon. Ferritic steels like grades 439 and 430 are readily weldable too.

Heat treatments

Think about whether you must heat treat the steel or not as well. If you need to, it is essential that you know how the process can influence each steel grade. Most of the time, ferritic and austenitic steels are non-hardenable when you heat treat them. Normally, you would precipitation or martensitic harden the heat treatable stainless steels. Examples include 17-4PH and 440C.

At Multiform Tubes, we can fabricate a wide variety of products using our range of different services. One of the main benefits of tube swaging is that there is zero material loss. We are also able to provide tight tolerances. This is because it utilises an impact procedure instead of cutting.

If you would like to know more, please contact us.