MetalForming Magazine: The Voice of North American Metal Stamping and Forming
MetalForming Magazine, based in Independence, Ohio, is the magazine of the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA) and one of the longest-serving trade publications for the North American metalforming industry. Published from PMA's headquarters community in suburban Cleveland, it serves the companies that create precision metal products through stamping, fabricating, spinning, slide forming and roll forming, along with the suppliers of equipment, materials and services who support them. Its website is metalformingmagazine.com, and its pages — in print and online — focus on the practical concerns of the pressroom: presses and pressroom automation, tooling and die work, materials, lubrication, safety, sensing, quality and the management of metalforming businesses themselves.
The magazine's identity is inseparable from its association owner. Where many trade titles answer to a commercial publishing house, MetalForming answers to an industry — a readership of stampers and fabricators whose association traces its roots to 1913 and whose collective work PMA describes as a $137-billion North American industry. That link shapes an editorial mission centred on competitiveness and profitability for member-style companies, whether or not any individual reader belongs to the association.
Roots in the Pressed Metal Era
The institutional story behind the magazine begins in 1913, when a small group of metal stamping companies formed the Pressed Metal Association to work together for the betterment of their industry. That first organisation dissolved during the Great Depression, but in 1942 the industry reorganised in Cleveland, Ohio, as the Pressed Metal Institute, founded by 42 charter member companies. Cleveland — and later Independence, in the same metropolitan area — remained the association's home as it grew.
In 1961 the organisation changed its name to the American Metal Stamping Association (AMSA), reflecting a membership centred on stamping. The magazine that would become MetalForming was founded later that decade as Metal Stamping. The publication marked its early milestones quickly: exactly five years after its founding, in March 1972, Metal Stamping incorporated colour, including a full-colour cover. The title stated its territory plainly — the stamping pressroom — and for its first two decades that is the world it covered.
From Metal Stamping to MetalForming
By the 1980s the industry the magazine served was changing shape. Companies that had defined themselves as stampers were adding fabrication, spinning and other value-added operations, seeking flexibility as their customers demanded more complete parts and services. The association recognised the shift formally in 1987, when AMSA became the Precision Metalforming Association. Jon Jenson, who had become AMSA president in 1975 and also served as the magazine's publisher, explained at the time that the industry needed to be redefined to match the technical and business trends sweeping through it, noting that about a fifth of manufacturing members were primarily fabricators and spinners rather than stampers.
The magazine followed the association a year later. With the June 1988 issue, Metal Stamping became MetalForming. The reasoning given then still describes the title's scope today: contract and captive stampers, perforators, precision sheet-metal fabricators, metal spinners, users of four-slide and rollforming equipment, and tool and die shops with production presses share common customers, common suppliers and similar legislative and regulatory concerns, and they shape similar materials by related methods. The broader name recognised that technologies once kept separate were being merged under single roofs.
The Association Behind the Magazine
PMA today describes itself as a full-service trade association whose members — more than 900 companies, primarily in the United States and Canada — also include suppliers of equipment, materials and services. Its stated mission is to shape the environment of the metalforming industry and lead innovative member companies toward superior competitiveness and profitability. It pursues that mission through advocacy, networking, industry statistics, educational programmes, tradeshows and the magazine itself.
The association organises much of its work through industry divisions, which over the years have included metal spinning — the first, formed in 1975 — washer manufacturing, slideforming from 1985, small-lot stamping and fabrication, custom rollforming, tool and die from 1999, a Next Generation division from 2006, and the metal stamping division, the largest, created alongside the 1987 renaming. PMA also works in Washington through an advocacy partnership with the National Tooling and Machining Association on issues such as supply chains, safety regulation and taxes, and it supports workforce development through the PMA Educational Foundation, which marked 25 years of work in 2022, the same year the association celebrated 80 years of continuous service since its 1942 re-establishment. In March 2025 the association elected Christopher Zuzick of Waukesha Metal as its chairman of the board.
What the Magazine Covers
Editorially, MetalForming is organised around the technologies and decisions that determine whether a pressroom makes money. Its coverage areas, as reflected in the structure of its website and issues, include stamping presses and pressroom automation, bending and folding, cutting, tooling and dies, materials, lubrication and metalworking fluids, finishing, safety, sensing and the Industrial Internet of Things, software, and quality control. Alongside the technology sits management coverage: workforce development, training, industry events and the business conditions facing job shops and captive operations alike.
The style is applied rather than theoretical. Typical subjects include how to protect dies with sensors and prevent press crashes, how quick-die-change methods raise press utilisation, how coatings extend tool-steel performance, how to stamp lightweight and high-strength materials, and how simulation software can test a forming process — checking for splitting, thinning and wrinkling, and compensating for springback — before steel is cut for a die. Case material drawn from working stampers shows how specific shops have adopted servo presses, automation, in-die processes and monitoring systems, and what changed on their floors as a result.
FABTECH and the Tradeshow Connection
No account of the magazine is complete without FABTECH, North America's major metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event. The association's tradeshow involvement began in 1981, when AMSA launched its first METALFORM tradeshow as a tabletop exhibition in Cleveland. In 2008 METALFORM merged with FABTECH and the AWS Welding Show, and the combined event was rebranded simply as FABTECH in 2010.
MetalForming is an official publication of FABTECH, and it produces a special FABTECH issue — the magazine's largest issue each year — ahead of the annual event. Its FABTECH coverage extends to exhibitor previews organised by technology, reports from the show floor, and the conference programme, whose stamping, automation, safety and workforce sessions mirror the magazine's editorial beats. For readers who cannot attend, the issue functions as a survey of the year's new presses, controls, robots, software and tooling; for those who do attend, it is a guide to an increasingly large show.
Training, Workforce and the Next Generation
A recurring theme across the magazine's coverage is people. Metalforming companies compete for skilled die makers, press operators, engineers and managers, and both PMA and its magazine treat workforce development as a strategic issue rather than a human-resources footnote. Coverage addresses apprenticeships and training programmes, the use of simulation and virtual tools in education, leadership development, and the association's Next Generation efforts to bring younger professionals into industry networks.
The magazine's management articles frequently return to the same practical questions: how to structure die-maintenance programmes, how to measure whether preventive work is paying off, how to retain experienced staff, and how to make manufacturing careers visible to students and communities. That emphasis reflects the readership itself — owners, executives and plant leaders at companies that are often family-owned and deeply rooted in their local labour markets.
Industry Data and Business Intelligence
Through PMA, the magazine sits close to one of the industry's sources of benchmarking information. The association generates economic and industry survey reports for its members, and the broader business climate for metalformers — order levels, pricing pressure, material availability and customer-industry demand, especially from automotive and appliance manufacturers — forms a regular part of the editorial conversation.
For a stamper deciding whether to add a servo press, bring a secondary operation in-house or invest in automation to offset a tight labour market, that context matters as much as any single machine specification. MetalForming's role is to connect the equipment story to the business story: capacity, cost per part, die life, scrap, uptime and the price of being late to a customer whose own production line depends on stamped components arriving on schedule.
Digital Presence and How Readers Use It
Like other business-to-business titles, MetalForming now reaches readers well beyond the printed issue. Its website organises articles by technology, making its archive searchable for a pressroom team facing a specific problem — a die-protection failure, an off-centre loading issue on a press, a lubrication question — at the moment the problem occurs. Digital editions reproduce the print issues, including the annual FABTECH edition, and online coverage carries equipment introductions and event reporting between issues.
The association's wider digital footprint reinforces the magazine's: PMA maintains an online training platform and a steady flow of educational programming, and the magazine's content feeds the same professional community that gathers at association events and district activities across North America.
Place in the Industry
MetalForming occupies a distinctive niche among manufacturing publications. It is narrower than general metalworking media — its centre of gravity is the press, the die and the coil — but broader than a pure stamping journal, because the industry it mirrors has itself broadened into fabrication, spinning, roll forming and assembly. Its long continuity under successive names, from Metal Stamping in the late 1960s through the 1988 renaming, gives it an institutional memory few trade titles can match.
For the companies in its pages, that memory has practical value. The questions that animated the magazine decades ago — die life, press productivity, material behaviour, skilled labour — remain the questions of the current issue, now joined by servo technology, in-press sensing, connected equipment and software-driven process design. MetalForming Magazine, published in Independence, Ohio, as the voice of the Precision Metalforming Association, continues to document how North America's metalformers answer them.
