Metal stock comes in a whole lot of different forms. That's because metal is needed for all kinds of different things, and the same steel that is in your car may be found in your glasses. However, the sheet metal that is used to make up your car wouldn't work very well for your glasses. That's where shaped wire comes in.
Shaped Wire
Shaped wire doesn't refer to the type of wire that you would use if your house were being wired for electricity. Instead, think of it more as rods that have been flattened down to be fairly small and then turned into the appropriate shape. The wires come in all kinds of shapes, from rectangular to round and even ones with notches. For example, a wire that has been shaped with a rounded edge on one side and a notch on the other may be the perfect thing to turn into the part of your glasses that holds the lenses. So, how is shaped wire made?
Cold Rolling
The first part of the process is rolling the stock down to the approximate size it needs to be. It's going to have to be about the right size before it gets turned into the right shape. Otherwise, the shape would get distorted as the metal stock was compressed down to size. The way that it works is that the stock is sent through a series of rollers. The rollers put a lot of pressure on the metal. Since the metal isn't heated up, that pressure needs to be used in order to create the wire. As the wire is formed, the stock becomes longer and longer, because all that metal has to go somewhere. The stock will also go through rollers that have the basic shape necessary. For example, if the basic shape is going to be a square, then there will be sections on the rollers that are square shaped, and the wire will be forced to go through that area. The final rolling is generally where the refining of the shape happens, with dies that will have the exact shape and size necessary to meet the specs.
Shaped wire goes into a lot of things and can be very useful. It isn't something that happens easily though. It takes a lot of pressure to create the wire, and it may have to go through other processes before it can actually be used.
For more information about shaped wire, contact a company like Precision Wire Shapes, Inc.
When you think about it, there are a lot of ways that manufacturing has improved over the years. For starters, it didn't used to be as safe as it is today, and people used to really struggle with various aspects of manufacturing, such as making products that are safe and useful. Additionally, making things used to take a lot longer, which raised prices. I started talking with different people about the benefits of modern manufacturing, and it was interesting to explore how much those simple improvements mattered in the long run. On this little blog, find out how to make manufacturing better than ever before, so you can create products people need.