One of the top goals in a metal stamping fabricator’s facility is maintaining an efficient production level. Over the years, customer expectations for accurate and high-quality material have gone up, all while operations face relentless pressure to deliver a cheaper product with a shorter lead time. How do you meet a higher demand while simultaneously keeping operation costs low with a lack of labor force? 

What is oscillate winding? Oscillate winding  (also known as traverse winding) is a steel manufacturing process that takes numerous ribbon wound, narrow slit coils from 0.04-0.250” thick by 0.5-2.0” wide, and welds them together, end-to-end. The resulting single, larger coil is then rewound like a spool of thread- going back and forth on the recoiler, creating rows layered one on top of the other. This process is often paired with edge conditioning, yielding a smooth, burr-free edge for safe handling.

Oscillate wound coils provide a continuous length up to 10 times longer than individual 
ribbon wound coils. This single attribute allows metal stampers to reduce operating costs and increase productivity. At each press utilizing oscillate wound coils, run times become prolonged leading to reduced loading times by up to 100%, fewer changeovers, and less setup time. Diminishing these inefficient tasks also prevents unneeded material handling resulting in 75% lower labor. Instead of needing four workers to manage four machines, only one worker is now needed to manage four machines at once. 

Additionally, oscillate wound coils provide uniformity with tighter industry standards for camber and flatness tolerances. Gauge-controlled methods are in place throughout the process, ensuring consistent steel you can rely on, from coil to coil, weld to weld. In result, metal stamping operations can expect an improved Lean Manufacturing process with increased coil yields, reduced scrap loss, and longer tooling life.

Siegal Steel created a savings calculator to immediately estimate how much stamping operations can reduce operations costs by switching to oscillate wound coils. Below is a real result from one of our customers after making the switch to oscillate wound coils. Prior, a 40,000 lb order for one part would take 320 man hours to complete. After using Siegal Oscillate Wound coils, they now can complete that same order in only 80 hours, which in turn reduces their labor costs and increases machine uptime by 200% to create additional revenue.

Find out right now how far you can reduce your operation costs.