Key Questions to Ask When Ordering Patterned Steel Plate

21 Jul.,2025

 

How Diamond Metal Plate is Made and Commonly Used

There are several metal formats that involve various patterns being stamped or rolled onto metal, and a good example here is called diamond plate. Commonly used in several industrial areas, diamond plate can be made from a few different common metal types.

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At Wasatch Steel, we have a huge variety of custom steel available for a variety of projects, including diamond plate needs. This blog will detail everything you need to know about diamond plate, from what it means and how it’s made to the common applications it’s generally used for.

Diamond Plate Basics and Uses

Diamond plate may also go by the name tread plate or checkered plate – each of these refer to the metal plate with a raised diamond pattern that’s created during manufacturing. Diamond plate can be made using both hot-rolled and stainless steel, and may also be created with aluminum in some cases.

Diamond plate has a wide array of uses, often seen in warehouses and loading docks. It’s known to be an excellent surface for walking safety, resisting slips and falls due to the added texture of the raised pattern.

Diamond Plate Creation

The process of creating diamond plate is pretty straightforward. It begins the same way as a standard metal plate or sheet production process, only at the point where the material is being put through rollers to help achieve the desired thickness, an extra step is included: The final set of rollers has a pattern that embosses the diamond shape onto the metal.

Now, how this pattern is embossed can vary slightly. For steel applications, hot-rolling will usually be used to bring the steel up to a high temperature before running it through smooth rollers. For aluminum, the design will be “stamped” onto the surface above the plate. There may be a few other less-used processes with stainless steel, but the hot-rolling process is highly economical and allows diamond plate to be sold affordably.

Common Diamond Plate Applications

Most of the common applications for diamond plate, as we referred to above, involve safety and precautionary areas. Some of the major areas you’ll see this in include:

  • Stairs, walkways or other high-traffic areas: Especially in industrial areas where equipment or other loads will often be carried across surfaces, diamond plate is often used to reduce slip risks. One highly common use here is on outdoor fire exits, where moisture can make surfaces slick.
  • Trailers and trucks: Those who regularly haul materials or perform similar tasks using a truck or trailer will know how valuable diamond plate can be on truck and trailer beds. It can also be used as an accent on bumpers.
  • Aesthetics: In other cases, diamond plate will be used as a visual accent or finish in architectural elements or designs due to its unique appearance.

Buying Better: The Definitive Cold Rolled Steel Gauge Chart

Cold-formed steel was first used in framing and construction around the s, both domestically in the United States and abroad in Great Britain. One of the first documented uses of cold-formed steel was the Virginia Baptist Hospital in Lynchburg, Virginia that was built around . 

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Due to lack of design standards and little to no information on the product, acceptance of the material was limited until the ’s when Lustron Homes built and sold almost 2,500 steel-frames homes, with the framing, finishes, cabinets and furniture made from cold-formed steel.

Cold-formed steel framed construction and homes are known for their longevity, strength, and resistance to harsh elements. This makes them ideal for even the most extreme environments and a notable sign of quality construction.

The first and most important rule of reading and understanding a steel gauge chart is using the right one. Meaning coated steel gauges like galvanized are vastly different from uncoated steel like hot rolled and cold rolled gauges. 

Standard gauge numbers and sizes were developed based on the weight of the sheet for a given material and coating. The equivalent thicknesses differ for each gauge number. You must use the specific gauge chart for each material to learn the right thickness. 

So, in this case, you’ll need the Cold Rolled Gauge Chart. 

Now that you have the right chart, it’s time to understand how it’s measured. Gauges are different from other measurement units such as inches or centimeters. That’s due to there being no universal thickness measurement for metal during the 19th century.

The British iron wire industry adopted metal gauges over other traditional units like inches as the primary unit of measurement, and thus it’s become the standard for the steel industry, being used across sheet metals.

When looking at a gauge chart, the key to understanding it, including our cold rolled chart, is to look at the number. Gauges range from 3-31, each has a specific thickness assigned to it for the material based upon its weight.

The general rule across all gauge charts is the larger the number, the thinner the steel. The inverse is also true, as the gauge number gets lower, the thicker the steel gets. But, those numbers do not give you specific dimensional values. Follow the chart for the exact numbers you need. 

If you’re looking for an even simpler solution to understanding the correct gauge, weight, width, and measurement conversions of any steel product, use our steel calculator Unravel.

Whether calculating gauges for cold rolled, hot rolled, and coated materials, looking for sheet metal or coil measurements, or just looking for unit conversion to inches and pounds, Unravel does the work for you.

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