Nail Manufacture

the fabrication of the simplest fastening devices—nails.

In antiquity man used nails made from fishbones, plant thorns, and hardwoods. During the bronze age the first metallic nails appeared, both cast and forged. Later on, the manufacture of nails from copper and iron wire was begun. In Rus’ nail-makers were known from the 13th century on. Nail production was a manual process up to the early 1800’s, when the first machines for making forged nails were developed. At about the same time, machines to produce nails from wire came into use.

Modern nail-manufacturing equipment is usually of the automatic rotary-press type. The most common are automatic machines with a horizontally positioned tool. They produce nails ranging from 6 to 250 mm in length and from 0.8 to 8 mm in diameter. Nails are used for building, roofing, upholstering, decorating, and wallpapering purposes and for packing cases and moldings. The subsequent processing of the nails (deburring, heat treating, galvanizing, and anticorrosion protection) is done on special equipment with mechanized loading and unloading. The majority of the processes of nail manufacture are automated.