Making Brass

Uses and Applications of Brass

Brass is one of the important metal alloys used today. It has a lot of different uses in people’s everyday lives and excellent properties that suit its usage to different applications. Adding metals to brass often yields good results that expand its usage.

An alloy of copper and zinc, brass has been around for thousands of years. Some of the earliest forms of brass were from naturally occurring zinc-copper alloys which had zinc contents lower than the standards used today. Since then, people have learned how to deliberately make brass, and the methods used to create it have been refined.

Different terms are used to differentiate one variety of brass from another. There are types such as “high brass”, “nordic gold”, “aluminum brass”, and “gilding metal”. They all have different proportions of zinc and copper, and may have other metals added to the mix for other intended applications. Aluminum brass, which has aluminum added to enable brass to be used in seawater service, is an example of this.

Brass manufacturers know that brass has a lot of different qualities that make it suited to create various items. Its malleability and acoustic properties, for instance, have made it the ideal metal for the production of wind musical instruments, like the trumpet and the tuba. Brass’ excellent malleability has found use in the form of decorations in buildings and homes. Its attractive color also added to its appeal, as used in making decors.

Hospitals have also found an unlikely ally in brass pipe suppliers. It has been found that some hospital-borne infections, like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile, which are spread through touch, die when they come into contact with a brass surface. This can’t be replicated by stainless steel or plastic so hospitals adopted brass as a deterrent to the said infections.

Aside from its numerous benefits, a brass rod is also amazingly 100 percent recyclable. Scrap brass does not lose any of its properties so it is recycled and made into new fixtures, decors, and other things without any loss of quality. Brass manufacturers often use 100-percent recycled brass so no raw materials are wasted in the creation of new products.

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Making Brass Knuckles from newspaper