Wire manufacturing processes and techniques
A contract manufacturer in San Jose was sitting on $180,000 of wire inventory at any given time. Carrying costs alone - warehouse space, insurance, capital tied up, oxidation losses - were eating $31,000 a year.
When a guidewire for a cardiac catheter needs to be exactly 0.014 inches in diameter - not 0.0145, not 0.0135 - there's only one process that can deliver that level of precision at production volume:centerless grinding.A Bay Area medical device company lear...
A fastener manufacturer in San Jose was buying pre-cut wire from three different suppliers. Every shipment came in at slightly different lengths - some ±0.030 inches, others ±0.060 inches. Their automatic feeders jammed twice a shift.
A medical device company was outsourcing wire forms to three different shops - each with its own tolerances, lead times, and quality issues. One batch of catheter guide frames came in 0.008 inches out of spec.
Spooling isn't just packaging — it's a precision process that makes or breaks your production line. Spool vs. coil vs. reel, traverse winding, and the specs to give your supplier.
Last year, a general contractor in Sacramento called us in a panic. He'd installed 2,400 feet of galvanized fencing wire on a $180,000 commercial project - and 14 months later, the entire east-facing ru
Here's something that keeps quality managers up at night: a single wrong ASTM callout on a purchase order can trigger a $500,000 product recall. I've seen it happen three times in the last decade - an
"A stent wire that is 0.001 inches out of spec does not just fail a quality audit - it can fail inside a patient. That is not an exaggeration. In medical device manufacturing, the wire you source is l
P.I.E. stands for Price In Effect. As many of you are finding out, when you go to purchase material you are getting quotes that say PIE.
This is one of our smaller centerless grinders, a Royal Master that we use for grinding wire from .125" to .030" in diameter. In this particular case we are end grinding and removing 15% of material, ...
With in-house centerless grinding, Western Steel & Wire can maintain short turnaround times on wire with custom length and diameters.
We get asked a lot what is the Rockwell for our wire. Material specifications only callout Tensile Strength not Rockwell. Fortunately there are tables that convert the Tensile Strength to Rockwell lik...