Bar stock

Most metal produced by a steel mill or aluminium plant is formed (via rolling or extrusion) into long continuous strips of various size and shape.

These strips are cut at regular intervals and allowed to cool, each segment becoming a piece of bar stock.

A good analogy is pasta-making, in which lumps of dough are extruded into various cross-sectional shapes; cut into lengths; and then dried in that form.

Tube and pipe are similar, but have hollow centers and are traditionally not called "bar" in industrial usage.

To create a metal component, a bar of sufficient volume is selected from storage and brought to the machining area.

This piece may then be sawed, milled, drilled, turned, or ground to remove material and create the final shape.

In turning, for large-diameter work (typically more than 100 millimetres (3.9 in), although there is no universal threshold), a piece of the bar is cut off using a horizontal bandsaw to create a blank for each part.

The not-yet-cut bar protruding from the back of the spindle, rotating quickly, can present a safety hazard if it is sticking out too far and unconstrained from bending.

Bar loaders are like magazines for part blanks (or pallets for milling work) in that they allow lights-out machining.

In forging, billets are heated to high temperatures before a press pushes the workpiece into the shape on the die.

Extrusion uses rollers that push the heated bar stock through a set of dies which will determine the shape of the workpiece.

A drill rod is tool steel round stock ground to a tight tolerance diameter; it is usually ± 0.0005 in (0.0127 mm).