The paper is concerned with the process design and the die design for manufacturing the preform of a large pressure vessel. The cold-working processes are introduced to improve the fatigue strength and to simplify the manufacturing process. By the finite element simulation, the parameter design is carried out, which is subjected to constraints such as the blank sire, press capacity and other minor limitations. The proposed design results are verified by the model experiments, in which the model is scaled down to one tenth of the original size.