The new Sjogren Spindle Cartridge Wire Straightener is a perfect example. It looks like no other wire straightener because it does things no other wire straightener can do. The reason we know that is because one of our customers came to us having tried all the available straightening technologies to achieve their production goals and none of them met the parameters.
The customer was working with ultra-fine wire — a diameter of .08mm — of high-carbon material, the application of which required very specific qualities for the finished wire, such as a very tight cast and yet an open helix. These requirements, in addition to constraints on the wire’s mechanical properties, made all market-available straighteners unsuitable to the task. That is when the customer turned to Sjogren for answers.
After reviewing all the different requirements, Sjogren developed the Spindle Cartridge Wire Straightener. This product’s innovations represent true breakthroughs that could affect the way dozens of industries approach wire straightening. Primary among these innovations are:
Spindle Mounted Straightener Rollers — conventional rollers have the wire groove machined into the outer edge of a bearing, with the bearing’s inner race fixed to the assembly body. Because of how bearings are engineered, this fixed-inner-race / rotating-outer-race approach reduces the bearing’s maximum RPM capacity by roughly -30%. The new Sjogren rollers machine the wire groove into a metal disc which is mounted on a spindle. The shaft of the spindle is housed in a cartridge, where it turns on the inner race of two bearings mounted there. This approach returns the bearings’ full RPM capacity, allowing the operation to run +30% faster than conventional straighteners would allow. Additionally, having the grooved roller separate from the bearings allows for custom groove shapes or alternalte roller material without requiring specialized bearings.
Greatly Simplified Stringing of Fine Wire — operators working with ultra-fine wire often encounter major production delays when it comes time to re-string a straightener. Wires with such narrow diameters (in this case, .08mm, roughly that of human hair) are very difficult to see and almost imperceptible to the touch. This makes getting the wire properly fed through the grooves of conventional straightener rollers a very laborious and innefficient task which frequently requires more than one attempt. Because the Spindle Cartridge rollers have the wire groove machined onto a disc rather than onto a bearing, the groove opening can be made much wider than the wire diameter, because the depth of the groove is not limited by the bearing’s case. This design innovation radically improves the simplicity of stringing the assembly: a task that typically takes a half-hour or more can now be accomplished in less than five minutes.
Fully Rigid, Non-Opening Assembly — the Spindle Cartridge Straightener is the first straightener to accomplish wire deflection by wraping wire around the outer arc of the straightener rollers. (As opposed to deflecting in-between an upper and lower roller with vertically offset centerlines.) This is a radical innovation never before utilized on a commercially available straightener. In addition to supporting the material property requirements of straightening ultra-fine wire, this approach provides two significant benefits: first, it removes the need for the assembly to open (even though it features multi-plane straightening!) which enhances the overall rigidity of the precision-machined assembly body, thus achieving maximum possible tolerance accuracy. Second, it allows the rollers to be spaced further apart which contributes to the ease with which the straightener can be strung.
These are the primary advancements that the Spindle Cartridge Wire Straightener represents for the industry. It has several other features — such as micrometer adjustement, which allows for easily repeatable settings — that further allow it to make a real improvement to a customer’s operation.
Because in the end, solving our customers’ operational challenges and making a difference on the shop floor as well as the bottom line is how Sjogren approaches all of our innovations. We’re just old fashioned that way.
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