Specialty forming machines are specialized or proprietary products and accessories for forming metal and other materials. Hot forming and cold forming processes allow metal to be shaped as necessary. During these forming processes, metal is stretched past its yield point to retain a new shape. Hot forming processes include forging, extrusion, and casting. Cold forming processes include cold forging, cold rolling, and swaging. Other processes for specialty forming machines include bending, stamping, shearing, and welding.

Many different types of specialty forming machines are used to press, hammer, extrude, shear, or otherwise form the metal into desired shapes. These specialty forming machines include arbor presses, metal beaders, a bending machine or forming machine, can making machines, die casting machines, drop hammer machinery for forging and shaping metal, electroforming machines, and extruding machine. A general-purpose forming machine is suitable for many applications. Specialized forming machines include power hammers, magnetic forming machines, a pneumatic or hydraulic metal forming machine, plasma jets, hydraulic and pneumatic presses, shearing machines, shock wave forming machines, and lathes.

In general, hot forming specialty forming machines use high amounts of kinetic energy to form the metal. With cold forming specialty forming machines, however, the press frame builds up stress during the pressing operation. In turn, that stress is released to cut through the metal blank. A roll forming machine is a type of specialty forming machine that processes strips of metal into desired shapes. Typically, the strip of metal is fed via a machine tool in coil form and then passed through a series of roller dies. In this way, roll forming eliminates multiples stages of production. Like metal forming, there are also forming techniques to shape plastics. Plastic vacuum forming is a process that is used to shape many types of plastics including polythene. Plastic vacuum forming is required when an unusual shape is needed.