Wire Straighteners Guide

What is a Wire Straightener?

As the name implies, wire straighteners, which are also called wire straightening machines, can accurately remove the irregularities and bends from the coil of the wires rapidly. Wire straightening plays a crucial role in the process of wire production, which is often the final step before cutting and collecting. In addition to round wires, many advanced wire straighteners today can also be used to straighten tubes, flat strips, other linear shaped materials, such as square, triangular, D-shaped, hex, and so on. The diameters of the wire that the wire straighteners can handle depends on the size and machine manufacturers. Typically, the available wire diameters range from 0.15mm to a maximum of 9.4mm.

Several rollers are responsible for removing helix and cast in the wire straightening machines, which can ensure optimal wire straightness and free from defects. There are a variety of wire straightening machines, which are different from the amounts of working planes, the amounts and types of rollers and bearings. With a digital servo motor, the automatic feeding and straightening process removes the need of extra manpower, saving the operator’s time cost and personnel cost, also ensuring the high precision at a high speed.

How Does a Wire Straightener Work?

Wire straighteners allow rapid and mass production of straightened wires. Before feeding into the wire straightening machines, the wire drawing process of coiled wires creates curved sets into the wires. The process imparts internal residual stresses and produces irregularities rather than straight lengths. Wire straightening machines come in single plane, double planes and four planes with every individual plane containing several roll bearings. The machines straighten the wires in different planes and different directions with the rotating rollers while the wires passing through the wire straighteners. Above the limit of the metal elasticity, the operation relieves the residual stress of curvature of the coiled wires. Generally, the yield strengths of the process wires will be substantially less than the coiled materials.

Basic Structure of Wire Straighteners

The crucial components in wire straighteners the controlled feed and spinner, the straightening roller, a unique runout with cutters, and the collector.

● Feeding Wheels:

Feeding wheel consists of dual spinners, which allows stable feeding of the coiled wires. The spinners are mounted as pairs as standard. The speed of rotating and feeding can be controlled by an independent controller or panel in order to optimize the straightness and running speed.

● Straightening Roller:

Series of straightening rollers or roll bearings are mounted on different planes of the wire straighteners. As the materials pass through the designed rollers, the helix and bend will be eliminated. The roller tension can be manually adjusted or automatically set, and typically there are position indicators on rollers for fast and simple setups. The designs of rollers and bearings are crucial to the quality and straightness of the wires. 

There are a variety of straightening rollers that can be customized and displaced for unique applications. For example, there are bearings which are machined to have 120 degrees of V-grooves. The designed bearings have less friction and wear than a regular one. Roller guides are ideal for round or flat metallic wires, tubes, cables and also plastic linear materials, which are more suitable for wires with diameters less than 3mm. 

Rollers with a single row of ball bearings in wire straighteners are more widely used for handling light to medium duty. On the other hand, rollers with double rows of bearings and much higher outside rings have relatively high load capacity and allow high operation speed. The outside ring is recommended to be made from hardened alloys when working with bearings with centrifugal forces.

● Cutter:

Cutting unit, mostly a servo flying shear technology, often utilized with wire straightening machines to measure and customize the length of the processed wires. The servo shear can provide flush end cutting at full operating speed repeatedly. The cutter is generally mounted on the carriage and moves parallel to the wire flow. The drive will accelerate the carriage to synchronize with the production rate. After one cutting cycle ends, the carriage will move back to its original position and prepare for the next cut.

● Collector:

Most straighteners have collectors which are mounted at the floor to collect and store the straightened, measured and cut wires. 

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