Trademark Alloys
With wide experience of market requirements, gained from over 45 years’ trading, Columbia Metals has developed a comprehensive range of proprietary alloys, each of which offers a unique blend of properties.
These materials include NIBRON SPECIAL®, an extra high strength nickel bronze, which is widely used in many varied and demanding applications.
COLSIBRO® and TROJAN® are precipitation hardened, multipurpose alloys exhibiting high strength characteristics, together with excellent wear properties.
Other trademark alloys, such as COLPHOS 90® and COLSPEED 90®, have been developed to satisfy user demands for free machinability.
The range is further complemented by COLDUR-A®, a high silicon bronze alloy. This material offers outstanding fabrication properties in combination with other characteristics making it valued by engineers, architects, sculptors and the artisan trades.
View our full range of trademark alloys.
NIBRON SPECIAL®
NIBRON SPECIAL® is a superb engineering material, specially developed to provide a combination of high performance engineering properties not found in any other alloy. It is one of the highest strength copper alloys available which also retains good levels of ductility. This, together with its excellent corrosion resistance, in both marine environments and a large range of aggressive industrial media, has resulted in NIBRON SPECIAL® becoming the material of choice in many demanding applications.
NIBRON SPECIAL® is resistant to hydrogen embrittlement, stress corrosion cracking and both pitting and crevice attack. The alloy retains a useful level of strength up to temperatures of around 250oC and is not prone to embrittlement at sub-zero temperatures. It offers high wear resistance and exhibits good anti-galling characteristics in many applications.
Though harder than the normal bronzes NIBRON SPECIAL® is readily machinable and is used in a wide variety of demanding applications. These include high strength bolting and critical sub-sea components, employed in aggressive offshore environments, hydraulic components, landing gear bushes and many other critical engineering components.
View NIBRON SPECIAL® Datasheet
COLSIBRO®
COLSIBRO® is an age-hardened copper-nickel-silicon alloy which offers a remarkable blend of properties. The alloy is characterised by superior strength coupled with good thermal and electrical conductivities and excellent corrosion resistance in a variety of environments, including marine.
Additionally, COLSIBRO® possesses excellent bearing and wear characteristics together with very low magnetic permeability, spark resistance, good elevated temperature properties and minimal loss of impact strength at sub-zero temperatures.
Columbia Metals supplies the alloy in the fully heat-treated condition and, unsurprisingly, this versatile alloy finds its use in a wide spectrum of engineering applications. These range from valve guides and bearings in high performance racing engines to electro-mechanical components, hydraulic equipment parts, mechanical fasteners and a wealth of other high duty engineering applications.
TROJAN®
TROJAN is also an age-hardened copper-nickel-silicon alloy with similar characteristics to COLSIBRO®. TROJAN, however, is produced with increased levels of nickel and silicon in order to further increase the mechanical strength. Once again this alloy exhibits a remarkable blend of properties characterised by superior strength coupled with good ductility and excellent wear and galling resistance. It also possesses good thermal and electrical conductivities and excellent corrosion resistance in a many environments.
As with its partner grade COLSIBRO®, this alloy is readily machinable and finds use in a similar range of applications that require superior mechanical properties.
COLDUR-A®
COLDUR-A® is a copper-silicon-manganese alloy often known as silicon bronze or silicon manganese bronze and sometimes referred to as architectural bronze. The metallurgical characteristics of this alloy make it one of the easiest of all copper alloys to fabricate, by a wide range of techniques, and the alloy is readily formable by both hot and cold methods. It possesses good to excellent joining characteristics e.g. by welding, brazing and soldering and is rated as “readily machinable”.
However, COLDUR-A® also exhibits a useful range of other properties which include a strength level similar to that found in the high tin bronzes, excellent corrosion resistance in many environments including both industrial and marine atmospheres, low magnetic permeability, good wear and shock resistance and non-sparking characteristics.
COLDUR-A® finds use in many areas where its excellent workability and rich, reddish old-gold colouration make it highly desirable for decorative metalwork. The alloy is used extensively in architectural applications and is a favourite medium for many sculptors. In addition, COLDUR® finds numerous uses in chemical and process plant and water storage systems as well as for fasteners and many other general engineering applications.
COLPHOS 90®
COLPHOS 90® is a wrought phosphor bronze which exhibits outstanding free-machining characteristics due to a controlled addition of lead. As its name implies, this material exhibits a machining performance which is around 80-90% of that attained by the benchmark, free cutting brass. The alloy provides good mechanical strength and ductility together with excellent fatigue characteristics. It offers similar corrosion resistance to that of the high tin phosphor bronzes in addition to good resistance to stress corrosion cracking.
The material finds its primary application where good bearing properties are required and it is noted for its resistance to seizure, good wear resistance and self-lubricating and self-seating capabilities.
COLPHOS 90® is typically used for bushings, thrust washers, gearbox parts and all manner of bearing surfaces.
For an immediate quotation or for more information on any of the alloys listed please contact us on the form above.
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