EoW November 2012

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November 2012 43
Feature
Steel wire,
rod & rope
production
Photo courtesy of bigstockphoto.com Photographer Eugen Perzhinsky
r 2012
The superbly engineered and complex
apparatus reviewed here provides a
starting place for a seemingly limitless
array of carbon steel and stainless steel
wares, in applications from a dentist’s drill
to a crane tall as a skyscraper.
Such versatility is possible only with
designed-in acceptance of a broad range
of criteria imposed by customers with-
out end-product inhibitions: galvanized,
bright, lubricated, dry; round and com-
pacted; tensile strength, hardness,
weldability; sizes from 1mm up to 83mm
and beyond.
Thewebsite of amanufacturer of steel wire
rope asks an interesting question about
the company’s highly evolved product.
With its mass of wires moving together,
in unison and harmony, and bending in
response to defined and lengthening
factors – all the while resisting the effects
of heat, fatigue, rotation, crushing, and
metal loss and deformation – is the wire
rope itself perhaps entitled to be called a
machine?
Probably the providers of the products
and services featured in this section of
EuroWire would not go so far. But they
will understand the thinking behind
the question.