Steel: Commercial Bars

Commercial bars refer to steel produced industrially on a large scale in steel mills or rolling plants.

These materials are standardised and designed to meet the most common needs of modern manufacturing.

Their chemical composition and shapes are standardised, making them easy to use in industry. In demanding sectors such as automotive, aerospace or mechanical engineering, this composition is crucial as it determines strength, ductility and heat treatment properties.

For crafts and small-scale workshops, however, the composition is often less critical.

For example, XC 48 steel contains approximately 0.48 percent carbon, a few natural impurities and the remainder is iron. This is sufficient for producing basic tools or common mechanical parts.

Designations

The same steel may have different names depending on the standard system used.

An alloy such as C45 may also be referred to as C45U or 1045 depending on whether a French, European, German or American standard is applied.

Suppliers therefore have to navigate these different conventions, which is why a single material can appear under multiple names.

Main characteristics

Steel offered by suppliers is mainly distinguished by its shapes, dimensions and surface conditions.

Plates, round bars, rectangular bars and, more rarely, octagonal bars or special profiles are commonly available.

Bars come in a variety of diameters and can be sold cut to length or in standard industrial lengths of around six metres.

 The surface may be lightly oxidised for corrosion protection, delivered raw but cleaned, or coated with a protective layer such as zinc or tin.

Even though millions of combinations are theoretically possible, suppliers mainly provide the most common products used by the majority of industrial sectors.

Miniature commercial bars

At a smaller scale, finding the exact size needed becomes more difficult.

Very small diameters, thin sections or thin plates are often not available as standard.

Even industrial suppliers sometimes have to place special orders to obtain these dimensions.

This demonstrates how suppliers focus on the most commercially viable sizes, leaving unusual dimensions harder to obtain.

The artisanal solution

In a workshop producing miniature objects, the most reliable solution is to create one’s own bars and plates from standard materials. 

We transform standard steel bars to produce pieces perfectly suited to our requirements.

This allows us to control thickness, width, length and even surface quality according to the project’s needs.

For example, we frequently make a miniature bar before beginning the production of steel objects.

This provides a uniform starting material that can then be machined or forged with precision.

Producing miniature bars

Creating miniature bars often requires starting with very small metal pieces, scaled to the objects being made.

One of the simplest and most controllable methods is forging by hand.

By hammering a piece of steel, copper or another suitable metal, it is possible to reduce its section, elongate the material, refine the shape and adjust dimensions to a fraction of a millimetre if necessary.

This approach gives great creative freedom and produces materials that cannot be sourced commercially, perfectly adapted for miniature parts or complex mechanisms.