Shaveability of steel rod - Steelwool manufacturing

Steel wool is made of very fine steel wire cold drawn and with a high carbon content. It is not made by shaving steel rods.

steel shavings will also be very brittle = break, which you do not want in finished products. Steel wool is also a mature technology and you can buy it very cheaply and it is also capital intensive to set up = barrier to your entry

Contrary to other posts, the process involves both shaving and Low carbon steel.

Cold drawing sizes the rod ahead of the machine so that the cutters can get a consistent depth of cut, but drawing by itself was NOT the way that the indivdual filaments were prepared. Also drawing was not in my experince a separate process.

I was lab supervisor at a mill that produces thousands of tons of rods for this product. The steel was Low carbon, and we held certain nonmetallic constituents (silicon, phosphorus, and sulfur are nonmetallic) to very low levels as they could create a nucleation site for the shaving to break. (if they had tried High carbon or medium carbon, the filaments would be tougher, springier,m and tended to break. Steel wool requires soft, ductile, bendable fibers in order to clean and not scratch).

There is an excellent site describing the process here:

http://www.answers.com/topic/steel-wool

This sites answer corresponds with my experience. Be careful about rod defects, as they will bcause the filaments to break, and cutting wool wire needs a controlled chip!!!

milo