United Bright Bar (UBB) is an independent UK-based manufacturer that has been serving the multi-repetition turned parts industry for over 40 years. As well as supplying standard products it can also meet bespoke requirements for customers on short lead times
Managing Director John Russell says: “Over the past five years we have made significant investments in state-of-the art drawing equipment and ancillary processes to enable us to offer a product that is compatible with anything that is available in the industry at this moment.
“These investments ensure that our product is ideally suited for CNC machining with special emphasis on straightness and bar end enhancements.”
The investments include a new Schumag coil-to-bar drawing line that incorporates shot blasting, eddy current crack detection, facing and chamfering capabilities for bar ends and a vertical 2 roll reeler offering 1 in 3000 minimum straightness, which is critical for today’s precision machining industry.
UBB produces from coil to bar, round bar from 6mm – 36mm and hexagon bar from 8mm – 32mm in metric and imperial sizes. The line capacity has recently been extended with the addition of an off-line bar end machining unit.
Complementing this is a bar-to-bar drawbench line producing larger diameters from 25mm – 76.2mm in round bar and 25mm – 70mm in hexagon bar. This has recently been enhanced by the addition of an offline eddy current crack detection unit that allows UBB to offer a surface class 2 finish.
Commercial Manager David Mycock adds: “As well as offering a full range of metric and imperial diameters and hexagons, we can offer bespoke lengths as we manufacture the product ourselves. We carry a full range of our own stock that means we can guarantee a quick response and fast deliveries. We also carry a large stock of raw material so that we can make it to order if required – again with a fast response time.
“What is important is that we can provide full traceability on all our material right from the bar bundle and batch back to the steel mill that produced it and the cast number. And that mill will be in the UK or in Europe.
“As we have been around for 40 years, there is a lot of expertise and knowledge of the industry in the business. It is still a family-owned business, which is important in terms of long-term continuity and investment – and we are continuing to invest.”
He adds that as an independent UK manufacturer it can offer a lot more than other suppliers and stockholders.
“We can match anything that is coming in from Europe, but we can also offer a lot that they can’t. Metric and imperial sizes, short lead times and smaller order sizes – a tonne, two tonnes – you don’t have to order 25 tonnes at a time. We can do bespoke lengths – 5.5m, 4m, 3m, whatever the customer needs. And as long as we have got the die, or can get the die we can do bespoke sizes too.”
John Russell adds: “And we can do all this because we are manufacturing the product ourselves, not buying it in.
“Our stock of finished goods is backed up by a substantial stock of raw materials to make product on demand. A stockholder may keep a vast range of various stocked items but they wouldn’t necessarily be able to back it up with the ability to manufacture to customers’ requirements on short lead times – I think that this is really where we fit in.”
David Mycock explains: “We can meet bespoke requirements for crack detection, surface finish and tolerances. For example, one customer wants a ‘bearing fit’ tolerance on the outside diameter. This means that, on a roller for a conveyor, they can just slide the bearing onto the end of the bar as supplied. That it quite a specific and unique requirement, but it shows what we can do.”
UBB can also offer customers bespoke chamfers on the bar ends. These help them feed the bars more easily into their machine tools – the chamfer can be on one end or both ends.
On hexagon bar UBB can offer a ‘spanner fit’ tolerance. This means that customers making components such as fasteners and connectors do not need to machine the outside surface of the bar.
Concluding, John Russell points to the consistency of machining performance that come from a consistent bar product:
“One of the things that is worth noting is that UBB can offer consistency of product because it is always sourcing from the same mills, whereas with a stockholder you don’t really know where it has come from. That helps, and not only with the traceability, but also with the consistency of manufacturing. Every steel mill will manufacture in a different way. It might be an electric arc furnace, it might be a BOS furnace, but if we consistently buy from the same place, supply the same steel and draw it in the same way. So people that have set up their machines and are used to using our bar , when they get a delivery from us next week it will machine the same way as it machined the week before.”
Advantages of Bright Bar
The advantages of bright bar are straightness, consistency, mechanical properties, surface finish, concentricity. Modern CNC machining needs very straight bar. So end users really focused on high quality, straight bar. With bright bar you can use the outside of the bar as the finished tolerance and when you draw it you are creating mechanical properties in the surface of the bar that makes easier to machine.