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Where is all the wire made now?

Motorsports-X

Hot Rolled
Joined
Nov 22, 2014
Location
Texas
I guess Bedra has started moving everything to china/vietnam now. GlobalEDM and Makino SST merged, and I think their wire is made in Vietnam also. Thermocompact I beleive is in France, they do make some diamond wires here I believe. Does no one make wire in the US anymore?

There must be a evolution occurring in wire right now. either in patents, or actual product development, it seems like every time I turn around there is a new wire, or the old one is gone and replaced with such and such. Even my wire from sodick doesnt seem consistent anymore.


(seems that LaserKut is still made here)
 
Hi Motorsports-X:
I buy Excel wire from Electrodes of Canada.
It's Korean and works well.
They also sell a South American (Peruvian?) brand which was unsatisfactory; it wasn't completely clean and gummed up the wire guides to the point where the machine wouldn't thread after less than one spool.
This was a number of years ago, and they were very concerned about my experience, but I went back to the Excel so I have no idea if the problem was successfully corrected.
The Peruvian wire was about $10.00 cheaper per spool if I recall correctly, so it was a significant savings.

As far as newer greater technology goes, I suspect there's more branding going on than innovation going on.
Most of the innovation was probably tried out at least twenty years ago.
Stratified wires, steel core wires, different zinc proportions, copper wires etc etc; all these things are decades old and all have had their day in the spotlight and are now relegated back to the role of useful tools for your toolkit but not ground-breaking magic.
I know there are wires and machines out there tailored to one another, but for the most part plain brass works well enough for typical jobbing that there's not all that much to gain from "superwires" except under special conditions.

I've tried some specialty wires and have seen performance gains but not enough to induce me to stock them all, switch them out whenever a "better" wire would confer a small advantage, or put up with the high expense of some of the specialty wires, especially for bog-standard one-pass keyways and shaft bores and the like.
That sort of work is about 50% of what my machine runs...the rest is super exotic weird shit and I'm probably pretty typical. (other than OEM's who can tailor a "best-fit" wire for a long-running production scenario).

Cheers

Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
Vancouver Wire EDM -- Wire EDM Machining
 
many multi national companies make partnership deals in many smaller countries where often they pay no taxes, given free use of land, sometimes empty factory is built for free by the government. all to create jobs and train their people for manufacturing
.
clothes and shoes for example are often made in small countries not normally thought as manufacturing country. like end mills made in Africa. you might be surprised at all the factories you dont know about in countries all over the world. why they do that ? obviously cause they can manufacturer stuff cheaper. sure its partially subsidized by the partner government. stuff been done that way for a long time
.
i believe the English brought in expert silk weavers from Europe like 500 years ago to setup factories in England. government partnerships been going on a long time.
 








 
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