Cold Headed Fasteners

Cold heading, also known as cold forming, is a room-temperature forming process that uses a series of dies, punches, and hammers at high speeds to produce parts. A metal rod or wire is fed into the machine, cut into pieces, and formed into the desired shapes. The components are work-hardened rather than machined or heated, resulting in higher strength and minimal material waste. The fast, efficient cold heading process creates fasteners like rivets, screws, bolts, and pins with superior fatigue resistance and precision.

MultiTech Industries (MTI) specializes in manufacturing cold-headed fasteners for a variety of industries, including automotive, agriculture, aerospace, construction, defense, and power tool assemblies. Our advanced, automated cold forming equipment streamlines production and brings down costs, so we pass on those savings to customers. Here, you’ll learn more about the benefits of cold-headed fasteners, our cold heading capabilities, and the fastener types we produce.

Benefits of Cold-Headed Fasteners

Unlike hot forging and machining, cold heading creates components without introducing high heat or cutting. As a result, this process offers several advantages for fastener manufacturing:

• Superior strength and durability. Continuous grain flow from cold forming enhances the mechanical strength and fatigue resistance of the fastener.
• Tight dimensional accuracy. Consistent, repeatable cold forming produces reliable tolerances and uniformity even across high volumes. In fact, cold heading can achieve tolerances down to +/- .002” without secondary processing.
• Material efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Cold forming produces minimal waste compared to machining, maximizing raw material utilization. High-speed, automated forming reduces cycle times and lowers per-part costs.
• Enhanced surface finish. Smooth, work-hardened surfaces improve fastener performance and reduce finishing requirements.
• Sustainability. Cold heading reduces energy consumption (no heat required) and results in less scrap material, contributing to eco-friendly manufacturing.

At MultiTech Industries, we can cold-form highly engineered standard and custom fasteners with diameters ranging from M2 to M22 and lengths of 3 to 230mm. With our in-house tooling, design, and engineering capabilities, we can develop unique solutions for challenging configurations or application requirements.

In addition to cold forming, we offer a variety of manufacturing capabilities as secondary processes to create fully finished components:

These capabilities support complex part projects, creating multiple features in a single run. This allows us to reduce lead times and maintain consistent quality across all stages of the manufacturing process.

Materials We Work With

Some of the common materials we work with are:

• Alloy steel
• Low to medium carbon steel
• 300 and 400 series stainless steel
• A286 stainless steel
• 52100 steel
• Monel

Engineering & Testing Capabilities

Our engineering team and “subject matter experts” work with customers to provide technical support through design, production, and testing. All of our facilities are equipped with fatigue analysis, clamp load, torque tension, predictive joint design, and other testing capabilities. We provide part- and application-specific solutions to help customers enhance production efficiency and maximize product performance.

In-house Tool Rooms

From our state-of-the-art in-house tool room, our tool and die experts can quickly prototype and produce custom tooling for your components, shortening development cycles and time to market for new parts. Unlike other providers that must outsource tooling work, Multitech can handle your project from start to finish with quality and precision, enabling faster turnaround times and lower costs.

Multitech’s extensive fastener testing & development capabilities provide tremendous value to our customers. Our team offers a wide variety of testing to achieve success in the application. We offer drive torque, strip torque, recommended installation torque, repeat assembly, and material tensile testing to name a few of our capabilities.

MultiTech pursues sustained performance and our customers benefit from this performance time after time.

MultiTech Industries ships over 1 billion components and assembles worldwide every year. We are committed to delivering consistently high-quality products to the critical industries that depend on us. Our culture, metrics, processes and state of the art metrology labs and equipment are all designed to help our customers perform better. The expectation of zero defects is on the mind of every MultiTech team member. So, when our customers and our industry recognize our efforts with awards for “supplier performance,” ‘leadership,’ ‘customer satisfaction’ ‘and ‘technical support’, we’re truly humbled. These awards motivate us to work harder to exceed the benchmarks set the year before.

Contact MultiTech Industries for Quality Cold-Headed Fasteners

Cold-headed fasteners from MultiTech are key components in automotive, agriculture, aerospace, construction, defense, and power tool assemblies. As a single-source manufacturing provider, MultiTech supplies more than just parts. Our design and engineering specialists can collaborate with you to develop custom solutions for complex projects. We have the technical expertise and cutting-edge equipment to design, produce, test, and deliver components on time and within budget.