All rolled and welded tubes are formed with very hard roll form tooling. The “tools” are actually forming rolls used to fold, bend, and shape the flat strips of material through various transitions until it reaches the final shape. The final shape can be square or rectangular tubing, round pipe, or a variety of other shapes used in construction and industrial applications.

After thousands of linear feet of these roll-formed shapes are produced, the forming rolls begin to wear in certain areas, even though they are made of hardened tool steel. Since the material is very hard, not just any machine shop can fix or repair the tools. It usually requires the services of a professional roll reconditioning company which can do the hard-turning, or regrinding using very specialized cutting tools and precision CNC lathes. It also requires highly skilled machinist who know what they are doing.

One service company who has many years of experience in making and reconditioning roll form tooling is Mill Dynamics in Birmingham, Alabama. The can also resharpen slitter knives and the rubber backup rolls used to slit the large steel coils into the correct width for the pipe and tube mills.

Many pipe and tube companies also use Mill Dynamics to make replacement roll shafts and bearing housings needed to run the pipe mill. They can duplicate existing shafts or produce new roll shafts from your detailed production drawings. If the bearing housings on your pipe or tube mill are beginning to show signs of wear, they can work with you to make new rolling mill shafts and bearing housings.