Felt Dies

OK guys, Let's say I want to hire a manufacturing & process engineer with some decent experience in wire enamelling technologies. Where do I go next? Trade mag? Do you have some contacts who might like it in Florida?

Spectre07, who is the supplier for this felts?

Tuber

Place a classified ad in Wire Journal International.

www.wirenet.org/promo/advertise.htm

Sincerely,
Peter J. Stewart-Hay
Principal
Stewart-Hay Associates
www.Stewart-Hay.com

I wish I could remember the supplier. I guess you might check the Thomas Register for felt suppliers. If I remember correctly there are not a lot. I think ours had a plant in South Carolina. For our SICME ovens that had felt applicators we used the felts supplied from SICME because they worked best. For the horizontal wire ovens we used a felt that had the fibers oriented like soda straws, perpendicular to the wire. The enamel flowed up the fiber to the wire. The enamel flow was controlled so that only the amount necessary for the wire went through the felt. The top felt was more like blanket felt and it was random fibers and when positioned over the wire, wiped off the excess. For really small wire we actually used first a teflon coated cloth to cover the felt and later a very short nap velveteen fabric.

For the vertical ovens (Acrometal made felt applicators for both horizontal and vertical ovens) we used the blanket felt.

Another aspect of the felt dies was that you could order the felt in different densities. This helped control the flow. The lower the density the easier the enamel flowed through the felt.

Felts worked very well in their time. A one time a vertical oven may have had 24 lines making 7 passes each. That was 168 dies and at $3-5/each you can see that dies were expensive. Since a typical vertical oven might run about 10 different sizes and each had a variety of configurations you might need a couple of thousand for a single oven. felt you bought by the square yard and it used to be about $10 and a single yard could provide felts for a couple of days.

On the other hand vertical felt ovens were challenging to run.

Sorry I cannot remember the supplier name.

Hi everybody,

I may interrupt your conversation but I´m looking for some help and I think you may be helpful.

I read about the split dies for enameling wire you mentioned. According to what Spectre07 said, these dies are kind of old and now solid dies are being used in enameling process.

I work in a magnet wire plant and I´m trying to reduce the time of changing enameling dies. My question is, do you know about split dies that work nowadays? or does it exist a new technology for changing dies faster?

Thank you in Advance,

Ricardo

Bettner Wire Dies
www.bettner.com