manufacturing

Technical Information

All of our malleable iron products are hand made in our Foundry in England using the greensand casting process. At this stage the castings are hard and brittle and cannot be hammered, filed or riveted into finished products. The castings are therefore subjected to a heat treatment process known as Annealing. In this process the castings are surrounded by an inert haematite ore within iron drums and loaded into ovens of six to eight tons capacity. The ovens take about two days to reach the Annealing temperature of 980C. The castings are then soaked at this temperature for around 80 hours after which they are allowed to cool naturally. During this process the carbon structure of the iron is changed. The resulting castings are no longer hard and brittle but soft and malleable.

After shot blasting and grinding to remove any rough edges the castings are then assembled into finished or
semi-finished products. Following assembly a rust proofing finish may be applied and a two-coat paint process is carried out before the products pass into our warehouse for final inspection, assembly and packaging ready for despatch.

Due to the nature of these hand built products no two handles look exactly the same, the operational pressure required to move the handles may also differ from product to product.

The window and door fittings made from malleable iron are available in Black or Pewter finish.

We hope that the foregoing has been interesting and informative and will help develop a greater understanding of what is involved in the production of traditional hand made ironmongery, and in particular the length of the production process.

By choosing Traditional Window Fittings, range of malleable iron products you can be confident that you are purchasing a quality product which is both functional and highly decorative and one that, well maintained, will give many years of service and pleasure.