What kind of machine is able to bend and twist steel into a custom-designed wire basket? Find out on Factory-Made.
A wire basket can be made in any shape and size for just about any purpose.
Like this basket that's used to hold 3-D glasses for movie theaters.
Every wire in the basket is custom-cut, bent and welded without being touched by human hands.
So how do machines make such a detailed and intricate basket?
The baskets for the movie glasses start out as coils of stainless steel wire, 3/16" thick.
That's uncoiled and straightened so the wire can be bent for the framework of the basket.
They use steel for the baskets because it's strong, but also because it's easy to bend, shape and weld.
To straighten the kinks from the coil out of the steel wire, it's pulled between two sets of straightening wheels.
The wire has to be perfectly straight or it could distort when it's bent and welded by the machines and the
finished baskets won't come together properly.
To form the upper frame of the basket, a continuous strand of wire is pulled between a two dimensional
bending machine that puts
four 90-degree bends into the wire to make a rectangle.
After the last bend, the clippers on the machine snip the finished frame away from the rest of the wire.
The bends are controlled by a computerized design of the finished basket that tells the machine how long
each piece of wire should be and how it should be bent.
For this basket, the top frame measures 15" by 18".
But the design could be altered to make a basket of almost any shape or size.
The bends are made by a wheel called the bending pin that pushes on the wire.
As each frame is cut free, it's grabbed by a robot that welds the ends of the frame together
with 50,000 watts of electricity.
More complex baskets require wires with more complex bends.
For those baskets, the bending is done by a 3-dimensional bending machine.
It can bend the wire into 3-dimensional shapes.
Like the 2-dimensional bender, the bends made by the 3-D bender are mapped by a computer program.
This particular wire is being bent for a basket that organizes phone cables for a telecommunications hub.
Between the 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional bending machines, there's not a bend
that can't be put into the wire to make a custom basket.
But not all of the wire that goes into a basket is bent.
Some of the pieces are straight.
To make those pieces, coils of steel wire are straightened and cut to the right length.
These 22" pieces are for the cross-bars on the baskets for the movie glasses.
After all of the cross-bars are cut, a computer-controlled robot welds the pieces together
into a wire grid that's used for the bottom and sides of the baskets.
The welder uses two copper electrodes to squeeze the pieces of wire together
and zaps them with 125,000 watts of electricity to melt the ends of the wire and fuse them together.
From here, workers take over to complete the baskets.
To start, a worker uses a ten-ton press to bend the grids into the bottom and sides of the basket.
Then custom features, like the rack to hold the 3-D movie glasses are shaped and welded to the grid.
Finally, the top frame is added so the basket will hold its shape.
When all of the parts are together, a fast-moving blade snips off the ends of the wires.
A polishing wheel gives all of the connections a smooth finish.
The finished basket is ready to go to work and do the job it was custom-made to do.
