To give good drawability, steel needs high volume fractions of the annealing texture component f111ghhkli and a low fraction of *f100gh0kli. This is achieved in conventional N b ‡ Ti stabilized interstitial free (IF ) steels by a cold rolling (CR ) reduction of 85 per cent followed by annealing at 750-850 8C for a few minutes. In this research, a detailed investigation of two-stage deformation processes was undertaken in which the total reduction in thickness was kept constant at 80 per cent, with a rst and second rolling interrupted by recrystallization (R X) before the nal recrystallization anneal was made. The texture produced is a rather at g recrystallization bre of relatively high intensity at a reasonable nal grain size. A second experiment, involving rolling ferrite at 700 8C, produced a strong rolling texture and a well-developed f111ghhkli texture after annealing at 710 8C, and so this material was also subjected to further rolling and annealing. The intermediate annealing between warm rolling (WR ) and subsequent cold rolling signi cantly improved the intensity and uniformity of the nal f111g texture compared with metal that was cold rolled without intermediate annealing. An investigation into the mechanisms involved in recrystallization revealed that the f111ghhkli oriented grains were subject to orientation splitting involving rotations around h111iN D , and this process of deformation banding produced the necessary lattice curvature for nucleation of the f111g recrystallization texture components essential for good deep drawability.