EDM wire: Choose the best wire for your machine

EDM wire is the workhorse of any wire EDM machine. But not all wire is made equal. This article explains how to choose the best EDM wire for your machining application.

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Since the invention of electric discharge machining, EDM wire has been a crucial tool in manufacturing.

Then, just like today, EDM wire is essential as an electrode that can cut through metal by spark discharge. However, different EDM wires have specific properties that are important to consider before selecting.

When choosing the best type of EDM wire for your application, it&#;s essential to consider factors like tensile strength, surface area per unit length, diameter, and shape.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

EDM wire size

When you&#;re working with EDM, you have to be careful. Many things can go wrong; if they do, you&#;ll have a broken part and days of lost time- scrappage of both time and material.

You&#;ve probably heard that a good wire is a key to good finish and precision&#;and that&#;s true. But there&#;s more to it than just choosing the diameter: you have to think about what kind of power your workpiece needs.

Here&#;s how it works: the higher the power setting on your machine, the faster it can cut through metal. That means that thinner wires need lower power settings and longer machining times. Hence, for most machinists, using a thin wire is not preferred because they want their machining time to be as low as possible.

However, there are some benefits to using a thin wire. We can make impossible features very quickly- features that are difficult to make with any other manufacturing process!

Different types of EDM wire

If you work with a wire cut machine, you must be familiar with different EDM wires.

But what are the different kinds of EDM wires, and what are their differences?

There are a few considerations to make when considering the type of EDM wire you&#;ll use for a project:

-The types of materials can it cut through?

-What kind of coating does it have, if any?

&#; Its tensile strength

Let us take a look at the different types of EDM wire-

Soft Brass Wire

Brass is an excellent choice whether you want to cut metal or shape it. Brass has been used in metal manufacturing for more than 5,000 years and continues to be a popular metal for many applications.

For cutting metal, you can use 0.010-inch diameter brass wire. This plain brass wire is the most common type of wire used in EDM work&#;over 80% of EDM work uses this kind of wire.

You can use soft brass wire to cut tapers because it has low tensile strength. Hence, it won&#;t break as quickly if you try to cut at an angle.

Hard Brass Wire

As a wire-cut machinist, you know that hard brass is the best material for roughing and skimming cuts.

Hard brass holds up to aggressive dielectric flushing, so you can apply a higher voltage to the wire without breaking it. And that means faster cutting rates&#;which means more cutting and hence more profit!

But what if I told you there was another reason hard brass is the best? It may sound ridiculous. But what if hard brass also helps you cut complex metals?

That&#;s right&#;harder metals like tungsten carbide were notoriously resistant to EDM techniques until recently. Now, thanks to hard brass as the electrode, machinists can use EDM techniques to cut tungsten carbide more efficiently!

Zinc-coated Brass Wire

Have you ever wondered about zinc-coated brass wire? If you haven&#;t, now&#;s the time to change that!

Zinc-coated brass EDM wire is pretty amazing. The coating acts as a shield against heat. If you&#;re working with brass wire and you don&#;t want the heat to damage it, the zinc-coated wire will help protect the wire from harm.

You might be wondering how this works exactly. Zinc has a lower melting point than brass, so it boils away first and takes in heat. Melting zinc helps keep the brass from overheating. With zinc-coated wire, less heat enters the wire, preventing damage to your workpiece.

Coated EDM wires also perform better mechanically. Zinc-coated brass has a rougher exterior finish than plain brass wires. The coated wire gives you even surface finishes that improve flushing and increase speed. You can get a 10 to 15% speed improvement&#;compared to plain uncoated wires!

High-Speed wire

You&#;ll often hear machinists talking about high-speed EDM wire or stratified wire. Such wires are nothing but wire with a copper core and a defused zinc outer layer.&#; It has the electrical conductivity of copper, which means it can cut at twice the speed of other types of wire. However, it&#;s also twice as expensive as different types. Plain copper wire is rare because it&#;s too soft and too costly. You will want to use this kind of wire for rough cuts.

No matter which type of EDM wire you select, please remember that you can use it only once. The wire cutting process degrades the wire. However, it can still be recycled and sold for scrap metal.

Wire Tensile Strength

According to an EDM wire expert- there are three things to consider when choosing an EDM wire: tensile strength, elongation, and linear density (weight per unit length).

These three properties determine how much force is needed to cut through a particular material by pushing the wire sideways in the cut zone between the electrodes. &#;The forces involved with cutting vary directly with tensile strength, so less energy is needed if you have a wire with higher tensile strength.&#;

One of the critical things to know about EDM wire is its strength. The tensile strength measures the stress that a material can handle before it breaks. The lower it is, the easier it is to break down.

The wire cut machine preloads the tension onto the wire. The wire may not touch the part during cutting. However, the machine&#;s wire drive feed mechanism stretches it. We can increase or decrease the tension depending on the cut.

Surface finish and EDM wire strength

The relationship between surface finish and EDM wire tension can be crucial for machinists.

It would help keep the wire tension low when rough cutting so the machine can cut quickly without breaking the wire.

When skim cutting, you need to increase the wire tension, which means slower speeds and lower voltage in the machine. Such settings allow you to achieve the maximum surface finish and precision.

Lights-out EDM Machining

Machinists can become more profitable by finding innovative ways to increase their machine productivity and usage.

One of these ways is a lights-out machining concept. The EDM wire machine can run unattended or without an operator, especially at night. Lights-out machining has several benefits for your business. It allows you to take advantage of cheaper electricity rates and lower costs overall because you&#;ll be running your machines at off-peak hours. You&#;ll also save on labor costs while still getting the most out of your devices, as they won&#;t be sitting idle when no one is monitoring them. There are no limits on how long you can continue producing parts with lights-out machining&#;you just set up your machines to run!

Buying EDM wire for lights-out machining

The benefits of lights-out machining are clear: you can save money, improve machine use and throughput, reduce setup time and labor costs, and minimize the risk of human error.

However, even if you already have a lights-out strategy, there&#;s always room for improvement. One of these ways to achieve lights-out machining is the way you buy EDM wire. With the standard spools in the market, you can gain about 8 to 10 hours of uninterrupted cutting. However, we also get larger spools these days with using which you can cut close to 40 hours with continuous cutting.

Automatic rethreading

It&#;s a pain. You&#;re in the middle of a big job, and your wire suddenly breaks. Instead of just continuing where you left off and finishing up, you have to stop what you&#;re doing and take care of the mess.

Almost all new CNC wire EDM units have an automatic wire rethreading system. So you can focus on what&#;s essential and leave the wire rethreading to the machine.

Codes in the program control cutting and rethreading of the wire. If the wire breaks accidentally, the machine senses the gap, rethreads the wire, and resumes cutting where the wire broke. Automatic threading enhances unattended operation by making it possible to produce multiple openings or features within a part in a single setup.

Want more information on wire separator machine? Feel free to contact us.

Conclusion

In conclusion, remember that the wire is the most critical component when using an EDM machine. It&#;s what makes the EDM machine go!

For best results, consider your workflow and the end goal of your job. Your wire&#;s shape, size, and material should depend on maximizing efficiency and saving time.

By making these considerations and knowing which type of wire is right for each job, you can save time, money, and hassle both in the short and long term.

Related Articles

How to correctly operate a Copper Granulator Machine?

When buyers purchase a machine, before using they need time to get familiar with it for a complete understanding, which will decrease the machine failure rate and save a lot of time in the future. What&#;s more, reasonable maintenance methods are also important, the right and appropriate maintenance can extend its service life effectively and make sure it can process waste wires at a high speed and get high-quality copper products successfully. We write this article for you to help you grasp all the relevant information better and faster.

Troubleshoot&#;&#; 25 Tips to Make You Succeed in Copper Wire Granulator Business

If granulator machines can&#;t operate at their optimal performance or have some malfunctions, the reasons may be complex due to the unique structures of different machine parts. But we are capable of dealing with these troubles with our rich industry experience. 

Now, we list 25 tips from 6 aspects to help you understand granulator machines in the market and provide solutions to all the problems that customers may encounter from installation to use.

25 Tips to Make Copper Wire Granulator Reach Best

Improper operation

1. Feeding too many waste wires will cause the main shredder to get stuck. If you meet this problem, you can shut it down immediately and cut off the main power supply, then open the upper cover, and remove the jammed waste wires.

2. If waste wires are covered with water, or oil, or wrapped with electrical tape, they cannot be separated directly. In these cases, you can wipe them, clean the oil on their surface and remove the wrapped electrical tape, but for different kinds of cables need to be different methods to process:

• For oil cables, you can use our water granulator machine to process them and add the solvent into the water.
• For car cables and cable with tapes, you can add some talcum powder when you process or before recycling.

3. Screws are mostly used in granulator machines production and play an important role in connection, so every screw must be tightened greatly. If you run the machine without tightening the screws enough, it will be easily damaged to the machine itself.

4. Check the support plates on both sides of the air separator system regularly and replace them promptly if there are any cracks or breaks.

5. The machine needs about 20 minutes of break to be ensured after every 4 hours of work, or else it will be harmful to the machine.

6. Check whether the direction of spindle rotation is consistent with the direction shown on the protective cover. If it is wrong, you should make a change.

7. Try not to tie the dust bag mouth tightly and leave a bowl-sized space for exhaust.

Abnormalities in the copper outlet and plastic outlet

8. If no copper particles come out of the copper outlet, speed up the vibrating table and reduce wind force.

9. If plastic particles come out of the copper outlet, slow down the vibrating table and increase wind force.

10. If no plastic particles come out of the plastic outlet, slow down the vibrating table and increase the wind force.

11. If copper particles come out of the plastic outlet, speed up the vibrating table and reduce the wind force.

12. The copper outlet of the air separator is equipped with a press plate, which is adjustable in height. The lower the pressing plate is, the harder it is for the copper product to come out. Generally, the pressing plate is about 3cm away over the air separator sieve surface.

Bad separation effect

The reasons for the poor separation effect can be analyzed depending mainly on three aspects: the situation of waste wires, blades, and crusher sieve or the operation.

13. If the interior of the waste wire contains hemp rope, fiber, aluminum, platinum and other substances, which will affect the separation effect.

14. If the blades are severely worn or not sharp enough, some of the waste wires cannot be completely cut off but are pulled off. The length of them is relatively long which is not conducive to subsequent separation therefore affects the final product, so you need to sharpening blades.

How to Change Blades of BSGH Copper Wire Granulator Machine

Shredder blades as follows:

15. If the raw material stuck in the crusher, then you need to change to a bigger crusher sieve.

16. Improper installation of the blade will slow down the speed of cutting as well as affect the separation result.

17. The machine should be kept in level ground which means there can&#;t be any shaking during operation. The machine shaking will disturb the vibration generated by the air separator system and vibrating table which is the main basis for separating copper from plastic skins. If the shaking is caused by a gap between the machine chassis and the ground, you can insert iron pieces into until the whole machine can work stable.

&#;The clean methods of the machine

18. The air inlet filter and separation sieve must be cleaned in time. Use an air gun to clean the debris inside air separator sieves regularly to ensure the normal separation of the machine separation system, blockage of the machine will affect the separation effect. When cleaning, you need to remove them first and then put the high-pressure air gun against the screen surface to blow away the blocked dust from the front to the back. If there are fine wires stuck in the mesh screen, you can use a scraper to remove them.

Use air gun to correctly clean conveyor belt of Granulator Machine

19. Dust collection bags also need to be cleaned in time to prevent the bags from clogging and affecting exhaust. You can open the dust collection box first and then hit it with a stick with appropriate force. If the force is too small, it will have no cleaning effect. If the force is too strong, it may damage the bag.

&#;&#;Machine Maintenance

20. The main bearings of the crusher, separator, and electrostatic separator should be filled with high-pressure and high-temperature resistant butter every 3 months.

21. The main bearing of the separator and the eccentric wheel on both sides should be filled with high-pressure and high-temperature butter every 4 months.

22. The front and back sides of the insulation board of the electric wire rack should be cleaned with an air gun one time every 10 days and the discharge wire should be wiped with a cloth once a month.

&#;&#;Safe operation

23. When feeding, be careful not to let the waste wires wrap around any part of the human body.

24. Spiral blades rotate at high speed inside the winch cage mouth, so do not put any part of your body into it.

25. There is high-voltage electricity in the electrostatic compartment. Do not put anything into it to avoid hurting.

Your Best Choice &#; BSGH Granulator

When you operate the machine, you can ask our sales staff, we have experience in this field for more than 25years, you can take more videos for us and show us even if you use the machine best, we also can check whether can adjust for you to the better effect, bigger processing capacity.

Big Capacity
800~KG/HMiddle Capacity
400~700KG/HSmall Capacity
70~300KG/H

When you use BSGH Granulators, you will have less troubles and have a better experience and pleasant journey for making more money.

Conclusion

This article acts as a communication link and bridge between products and customers. We hope it can help customers better understand product functions, performance, and other related information. Secondly, this article enables customers to use and operate the product correctly and avoid problems and losses caused by misunderstanding or incorrect operation. If you want to know more information, you can contact our staff at any time.

Are you interested in learning more about europe copper granulator market? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!