Discover the Harrison Spinks' Wire Drawing Department

We draw wires in the ASM summer materials science camp, but nothing that we do in camp remotely approaches this level of professionalism.

In terms of drawing a wire, we're an introductory art student, and the Harrison Spinks folks are Picasso.

See, 'cause they can draw wires better than we can.

Get it...Picasso...because he's an artist...he did drawings.

In all seriousness, seeing the very clean, seemingly safe process shown above makes me appreciate the less careful process for a similar result shown below.

Light bulb filament

This video, made to accompany an article on Wired magazine's website, absolutely blows me away. First off, the ease with which The Engineer Guy takes off the glass envelope of the light bulb at 0:45 is stunning. Can anybody recreate that with a pipe cutter? I've been trying for a couple of weeks with absolutely no luck.

At 0:58 then, the video does a great zoom in on the supercoiled tungsten filament and shows the original 20-inch filament coiled then coiled again.

The next part of the video - from 1:30 through 2:30 - explores the ductility of tungsten and the processes necessary to make it ductile. The six steps - at 2:00 - absolutely blow my mind. That anybody could ever figure those steps out is amazing.

And the video closes with explaining the need for the glass envelope and the gas within.

Great, great video!

XY Wire Drawing Machine Video 1

The consistent tone and repetitive sounds make this a perfect video to doze off to.

The idea is simple enough. A spool of wire is fed through a lubricator then through a draw plate. The wire is then rewound and the process repeated.

I recommend starting the video at about 2:20 so that you can watch the full process from beginning to end. Pay particular attention to the speed of the first spool as compared to the successive speeds - especially the final one.