Forged for Strength: How Swedish Steel Powers the Eleiko Bar

The barbell is the lifter’s most essential tool and at Eleiko, the bar begins with steel. Not just any steel, but clean, precise, high-performance Swedish steel, forged with purpose and tradition. The result is a bar that feels like an extension of your body — strong, responsive, and reliable — and one that lasts a lifetime. This is the story of the material behind the Eleiko Feeling.

Swedish Steel: Centuries of Metallurgical Expertise

Sweden’s reputation for steelmaking is rooted in a deep history of quality craftsmanship and mineral wealth. As early as the 13th century, Sweden was refining iron ore from Bergslagen — a region known for ore deposits with exceptionally low impurity levels, notably low phosphorus and sulfur. This purity created an ideal base for producing high-quality steel. By the 17th century, techniques such as the Walloon forging method brought global attention to Swedish iron, helping the nation become one of Europe’s leading steel exporters.

Innovation That Shapes the Future

Over the centuries, Swedish steel innovation hasn’t slowed. By the 20th century, Swedish steelmakers led the way in adopting cutting-edge production methods like electric arc furnaces, improving efficiency and quality. By the mid-century, Swedish steelmakers focused on specialty steels, utilising cutting-edge technology to optimise production processes. This resulted in steel with superior durability and precision — alloys tailored to meet the evolving demands of industries like aerospace, automotive, and, in our case, strength training equipment.

Sweden also became a global leader in sustainable steelmaking — investing in hydroelectric power, circular manufacturing, and advanced recycling.

Explore our commitment to sustainability here.

Eleiko and Ovako: From Waffle Irons to Weightlifting

Our story with Ovako began nearly a century ago. In the 1920s, we sourced Ovako steel for our waffle irons and other small kitchen appliances. Then, in 1957, we collaborated on something far stronger: Eleiko Steel™. Over the decades, we’ve refined a proprietary BQ steel that strikes a balance between strength and flexibility, resulting in unparalleled lifting performance. Eleiko Steel is forged from 97% recycled steel, utilising fossil-free electricity sources, resulting in an 80% lower CO₂ footprint than the global steel average.

Eleiko Steel™ is tailored to the unique demands of professional strength sports. Hot-rolled steel bars are heated to over 900 degrees Celsius and then quenched and tempered to achieve clean steel that is both strong and flexible. The tempering process is crucial, as it allows the steel to harden without becoming brittle, resulting in steel with a fine-grained, homogeneous microstructure — much like a well-mixed waffle batter, without bubbles or clumps of flour.

Every batch is tested, scanned, and inspected — from underwater ultrasonic testing to electron microscope analysis — to ensure the material is clean, consistent, and mechanically sound. Batches are quality-controlled to ensure hardness and tensile strength meet our rigorous requirements.

The process results in Eleiko Steel™ that has:

• Fine-grained, homogeneous microstructure

• Tensile strength of 236,000 PSI

• Shaft hardness of 478 HB (Brinell scale)

• IT6 shaft tolerance for precision straightness

Understanding Strength: What Makes Steel Strong

Strength in steel is established in its atomic-level structure. As steel cools from its molten state, atoms arrange into crystals — forming a polycrystalline structure with boundaries between grains. These grain boundaries act as barriers to deformation. The smaller and more uniform the grains, the stronger the steel.

When steel is cooled rapidly (quenched), carbon atoms become trapped in a distorted crystal structure called martensite. Martensite is hard — but also brittle. That’s why steel must then be tempered, reheating it slightly to increase toughness without sacrificing strength.

Steel’s strength can also be improved by limiting the motion of dislocations — defects in the crystal lattice that enable deformation. When creating Steel, Eleiko’s supplier Ovako does this using two mechanisms:

• Grain refinement – more grain boundaries to stop dislocations

• Carbon in solid solution – adds internal friction

Barbell performance depends on controlling the atomic structure of Eleiko Steel™. Through precise quenching, carbon is trapped in a manner that forms the hard, tough crystalline martensite, resulting in a structure that resists deformation. Ovako takes this further with clean steel technology. Inclusions — tiny flaws common in conventional steels — are minimised and precisely distributed. This dramatically reduces the risk of fatigue failure, ensuring our bars perform through years of heavy use.

What Is Clean Steel — and Why It Matters

While these issues aren’t typically a concern with Eleiko bars, corrosion, knurling wear, and steel fatigue are the leading causes of barbell failure or the need to replace a bar. While tensile strength is important, fatigue resistance is what truly defines the durability of steel in real-world applications.

Most metal failures don’t happen all at once — they develop over time. Impurities and tiny imperfections can act as stress concentrators, leading to the formation of cracks and bar breakage. That’s why clean steel is critical — it’s the foundation of durability, the key to ensuring long-lasting performance, lifter safety and bar reliability.

Eleiko Steel™ undergoes underwater ultrasonic testing and scanning with an electron microscope. Every batch is thoroughly checked to ensure that our strict standards are met. It’s how we achieve 236,000 PSI tensile strength, precise IT6 straightness and concentricity tolerances, and can craft barbells that remain in use for decades.

From Swedish Steel to The Eleiko Feeling™

Eleiko Steel™ is just the beginning. What happens in our Halmstad facility breathes life into The Eleiko Feeling — the perfect balance, smooth flex, precise spin, and signature knurling associated with Eleiko bars.

Shaft straightness, which deviates less than ±13µm, ensures that knurling is perfectly even across the bar for a secure grip and reduced knurling wear. Inside the sleeve, our Optimal Rotation System™ delivers responsive, calibrated spin — whether through precision needle bearings for weightlifting, bronze bushings for powerlifting or a combination for hybrid training, each system is tailored to your preferred lifting discipline.

Our bar design enhances fatigue resistance, with our patented flange geometry reinforcing the bar to endure repeated drops without compromising integrity. We also protect bar surfaces with our DN3 Chrome™. This proprietary dual-layer treatment preserves knurling sharpness and resists wear, combining an elastic base with an ultra-hard, 0.3-micron trivalent chrome top layer.

Every Eleiko bar is serialized, calibrated and tested to perform with measurable precision — ensuring a bar that feels right from the first lift to the millionth drop.

Crafting bars that athletes have trusted for decades starts with the right steel. Built on the legacy of Swedish metallurgy, engineered with Ovako’s clean steel innovation, and brought to life by Eleiko’s craftsmanship. It’s not just engineering. It’s craft – one we’ve perfected over 65 years. And when they come together, it’s the unmistakable Eleiko Feeling™.

Find your bar. Experience the Eleiko Feeling