Metal Burrs: What Are They & How To Remove Them?

If you’ve never heard of a metal burr before, you must be pretty new to the metalworking industry. There’s no need to worry, though, because we’re here to tell you what metal burrs are and how to remove them. That way, you can be as knowledgeable as possible before working with them.

What Are Metal Burrs?

Metal pieces are rarely clean and perfect when they come out of the machines that shape them. Instead, they often have rough or sharp edges that must get filed down before a company can sell them to their consumers. These jagged ridges are more commonly known as burrs in the metalworking industry.

How Do You Remove Them?

Of course, since they’re a part of the metal, burrs aren’t a simple problem to fix. However, there are plenty of methods for removing them.

Manual Methods

The cheapest and most straightforward method to remove burrs is doing it manually. By using either a file or a coarse piece of sandpaper, a person can quite easily remove bothersome burrs by hand. However, if you need to fix burrs on a large scale, this method quickly becomes inefficient.

Putting Them Into a Deburring Machine

When the scale is your primary concern, you’ll want to consider an industrial deburring tumbler like the ones we sell online. The sole purpose of these machines is to grind down extrusions on pieces of metal, so they’re quite efficient. You might need different forms of media depending on the type of metal you need to deburr, but the results speak for themselves.

Using an Engraving Machine

If you don’t have the room in your factory or the budget for a brand-new device, you can use one that you might already own: an engraving machine. While these typically get used for finer details and personalized messages, you can also use them to remove simple, easy-to-reach burrs.

Chemical Deburring

For burrs that you can’t easily get to, you’ll likely need to turn to chemical deburring. Even though it will require an additional machine and all its associated upkeep, chemical deburring is perfect for getting to the tight corners and interior metal edges that other methods can’t quite reach.

Which Should You Get?

Now that you know what metal burrs are and how to remove them, it’s easy to see how a mix of these options would be ideal. If you can only afford one of them, a deburring machine will be your best option. It offers the most all-around experience and is the best choice for deburring at a large scale. But you really can’t go wrong with any of these choices.