Control and drive cable from Elyria's tool and bearing plants

Tools, bearings and the machines behind them

Hand and power tools, pipe tools and heavy equipment come out of Elyria plants that run long lines of machine tools. Aircraft bearings and precision components come out of shops where the tolerance is measured in ten-thousandths and a machine cannot be allowed to drift mid-cycle. Plastics and injection moulding fill in the rest of the industrial map.

Both kinds of plant generate the same cable families: control cable from machine to cabinet, drive cable from cabinet to motor, and portable cord at the operator station. Lengths are short and counts are high, which is the opposite of a mill lot and needs a different kind of description. That is why a tool plant lot is counted in pieces and weighed in pounds rather than measured in footage.

Vaults, tunnels and no freight elevator

The older plants here grew building by building and were wired in stages. A good deal of that wiring runs through basement vaults and service tunnels under the shop floor, and when a transformer or a line cabinet is retired the cable is often left where it lies, because pulling it costs more in labour than anyone wants to book against a shutdown.

Getting it out is the job. Stairs, a narrow door, a vault with four feet of headroom. Cable comes up in coils by hand and goes out through a man door, which sets a hard limit on how much can leave in a day and makes the weight per coil the number that matters. A pallet will not go up those stairs, so the coils come up one at a time and stack at the door.

Reading drive cable off a cabinet

Drive cable is identifiable. Three power conductors with a symmetrical ground, an overall shield, and a jacket that names the type. What comes off a drive run is reviewed on conductor size and shield condition rather than footage, because a shielded length crushed at a gland is a short length with a long memory.

• VFD cable, three conductor with symmetrical ground
• Control cable, multi-conductor, numbered
• Portable cord at operator stations
• Machine tool transformer leads
• Bearing test rig instrumentation

Small reels need firm identification

In a precision plant the reel tag is often the only record of what a cable is, and where tags have gone the print on the jacket is the fallback. Most control cable carries conductor count, gauge and temperature rating at one-foot intervals, and that print is enough to place a coil in the right family even when the tag is lost.

Where a whole cabinet's worth of tails comes out at once, bundle by circuit rather than by size. A dozen four-foot tails from one machine is a describable item; the same dozen loose in a box is not.