Bright steel is usually a carbon steel alloy which has had the surface condition improved by drawing, peeling or grinding over the hot rolled finish supplied by the steel mill.

Bright steel is essentially black steel material that has had further processing. The bright steel is processed further in cold reduction mills, where the material is cooled (at room temperature) followed by annealing and/or tempers rolling. This process will make steel with closer dimensional tolerances and a wider range of surface finishes. The term bright drawn is mistakenly used on all products, when actually the product name refers to the rolling of flat rolled sheet and coil products.

When referring to bright steels bar products, the term used is “cold finishing”, which usually consists of cold drawing and/or turning, grinding and polishing. This process results in higher yield points and has four main advantages

  • Cold drawing increases the yield and tensile strengths, often eliminating further costly thermal treatments.
  • Turning gets rid of surface imperfections for bright steels material.
  • Grinding narrows the original size tolerance range.
  • Polishing improves surface finish.
  • All cold products provide a superior surface finish, and are superior in tolerance, concentricity, and straightness when compared to black steel.

Cold finished bright steel bars are typically harder to work with than black steel due to the increased carbon content. However, this cannot be said about bright drawn sheet and black steel sheet. With these two products, the bright drawn product has low carbon content and it is typically annealed, making it softer than black steel sheet.

Uses: Any project where tolerances, surface condition, concentricity, and straightness are the major factors.