Use Cold Rolled Steel Instead Of Hot Rolled Steel Or Copper When Building A Coffee Maker
Over the past few years, a number of coffee-loving inventors and innovators have created new coffee makers for home and commercial use. If you have interest in making a new, innovative coffee maker, you'll want to use cold rolled steel for your maker's metal components. Using cold rolled steel will help you create a coffee maker that looks good, can easily be assembled and is affordable.
Creating a Polished Coffee Maker
Cold rolled steel often has a polished, shiny finish that comes from being temper rolled. Temper rolling is where this type of steel gets its name from. Before the sheets of steel are finished, they're sent through large, heavy tempers, which are essentially unheated rollers. During this stage of production, a few different finishes, including a polished finish, can be applied to the steel.
Hot rolled steel, in comparison, isn't rolled through tempers. Instead of having a special finish applied, hot rolled steel is left with a rough appearance.
The polished finish that can be applied in temper rolling makes cold rolled steel perfect for any external metal components of your coffee maker. It will give your machine a shiny appearance, which will match stainless steel accessories that coffee enthusiasts often have, such as gooseneck kettles, kitchen scales and coffee canisters.
Designing an Easy-to-Assemble Coffee Maker
Cold rolled steel has another advantage over hot rolled steel. Cold rolled steel is much easier to work with.
Hot rolled steel typically comes to customers in large sheets. It's difficult to control the final dimensions of a piece of hot rolled steel because the metal contracts slightly as it cools. Instead of making pieces to order, manufacturers of hot rolled steel ship full sheets and let their customers cut pieces to size.
Cold rolled steel, in contrast, is often made to a customer's exact specifications. Since it's cold rolled, it doesn't need to further cool after being made. Thus, pieces won't shrink post-production, and they can be made to exacting specifications.
When ordering cold rolled steel, you should be able to ask for pieces that are the dimensions you'll need to make your coffee maker. For instance, if your coffee maker will have a side that's 8 inches high and 4 inches wide, you ought to be able to order a piece that exact size. Even if ordering custom pieces costs slightly more than getting a full sheet, you'll more than make up for the additional costs in the time saved by not cutting the steel after you get it.
Building an Affordable Coffee Maker
Finally, cold rolled steel has a major advantage over another metal you might use in your coffee maker: copper. Copper would give your coffee maker a distinctive look, but it's much more expensive than cold rolled steel.
Recently, cold rolled steel hit a 1-year high. It's still much cheaper than copper. In April 2016, cold rolled steel was selling below $650 per ton. In comparison, copper didn't dip below $4,500 per ton during the the month. (Daily prices for both metals vary slightly.)
You won't need a ton of metal to build your coffee maker, but the price discrepancy between cold rolled steel and copper is significant even if you're using just a few ounces of metal. If you use copper, your coffee maker may be too expensive for many potential customers. By using cold rolled steel instead of copper, you can greatly reduce your material costs for metal components in your machine. Because you're saving so much on metal, you can price your coffee maker lower -- and possibly undercut other coffee maker manufacturers.
If you're tinkering with a new coffee maker design that you eventually want to sell, use cold rolled steel for all the metal components. It has benefits over both hot rolled steel and copper.
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