Cutting insulated steel ropes to length without thickening the rope ends

A supplier of Bowden cable wires and preassembled wire ropes of high quality had a special requirement for a new machine: It should be able to cut and strip insulated steel strands as well as to cut to length non-insulated steel ropes without the individual wires jumping up or the end or beginning of the rope thickening during the cutting process. Metzner Maschinenbau has responded to this demand by developing an automatic program-controlled production line: For this purpose an AM 3500 was modified and extended to form a complete production line with a driven reel unwinder, a special cutting module, and a material stacker. The latter are mobile and can be attached to the AM 3500 as required. The production line can process material with diameters from 0.5 to 5 mm. 

Plastic-coated steel cable wires/strands are cut to length using a special shear cut module and then stripped with the cutting module of the AM3500 without the wires "jumping open".
Bare steel cable wires are transported by the modified AM 3500 directly to the special cutting machine, which is coupled between the AM 3500 and the material stacker and which cuts the material to length by a thermal process. Due to the special electric welding process used here, the individual wires do not twist up during cutting, and a smooth rope start and a smooth rope end without thickening are produced.

Long steel cable wires/strands are placed in a tray after processing, while short pieces of material fall down a chute into a collecting container.

With the high-performance solution developed by Metzner, the customer can process two different types of material in different processes. Further advantages of the machinery are high precision, high quality, an increase in productivity and lower personnel costs.