Originally posted by sonhouse
Did you just get a job there? I thought you had posted you were unemployed.
Anyway, the site says they make the wire by taking a center wire, coating it with flux and dipping the wire in molten aluminum. That makes a lot more sense, especially if you want thick wire like they said, 80 mil to 220 mil thick wire with the starter wire in the center.
You ...[text shortened]... that is the kind of thing I do here every day, some new kind of project to figure out and such.
Did you just get a job there? I thought you had posted you were unemployed.
This is my second time around with the company. They downsized then asked me back (with a raise) six weeks later. So for now, I'm employed with them.
You live in Pa? We are on the east side near Allentown and your company is in Johnstown, near Pittsburg, right?
I do live in Johnstown Pa. (~70 miles east of Pittsburgh)
Are the questions you are relaying here part of a new way to coat wires they are starting?
No, standard way of doing it. The motives are mainly cost reduction associated with flux drag over. It turns out there is a device submerged in the molten aluminum that needs to be changed frequently if liquid flux is drug into the molten aluminum. The aim is to decrease the frequency of the change (extend the working life of the device). Also, there are benefits to the coating weight/consistency if the wire is heated to certain temps prior to entering the molten aluminum bath.
[qoute]Did I tell you about our company? Gulton, we make thermal printheads, the kind that go into the gas station receipts and grocery stores and such. They only last a year or two so it is a recurring business.
Gulton.com
I take care of sputtering machines and design various bits of electronics. My latest project, a home brew Capacitance Manometer readout device, they are very expensive and we needed to be able to calibrate our argon gas pressure in the sputtering machines, we have 4. 3 of them by the same company, MRC/KDF and one by MatVac. Anyway, our resident Phd process engineer was wondering if 10 millitorr in machine A was the same as 10 millitorr in machine B and so forth. The gas pressure can effect the surface coatings we put on our substrates.
So my box worked perfectly, cost about 100 bucks in parts and saved about 5,000 bucks by not having to buy the official product from MKS, who makes all kinds of vacuum related products like Mass Flow Controllers (MFC's) and Capacitance Manometers and the readout devices and much more.
I also invented a much improved plasma igniter, the old way was to have a 5 mil tungsten wire basically clamped with just friction between two split posts about 20 mil wide, just pinch the tungsten to the posts. It works but is a pain the butt to change the wire when it breaks, which happens all the time due to needing to clean the inside of the tool, open it to atmosphere and so forth, we inevitably break the tungsten wire in that process.
I talked our buyer into buying a 500 foot roll of tungsten wire which saves us money every time we redo the igniters. KDF charges us about 20 bucks for a two inch length of that wire and we used quite a bit of it over a year. Now we just clip off a bit we need and can use say 4 inches instead of 2, I coil the wire over a small diameter screw driver which seems to make the wire more robust.
So my improvement was to take thin wall brass tubing, hollow, less than 1/8 inch diameter and cut it to about 1 inch lengths and screw in a tiny screw in the end and then attach that to the old wire supports and now we can just unscrew the end screw and screw down the new wire which makes that process go about ten times faster.
It is really labor intensive to do it the old way.
Anyway, that is the kind of thing I do here every day, some new kind of project to figure out and such.[/quote]
Yeah, sounds pretty similar to what I do. (with the exception of being high tech) Our manufacturing environment isn't all that high tech ( which has begun to change in the last 5 years), but we are making an honest effort to modernize.