Southwire Company, LLC

James F Holladay

R Emory Starnes

Bobby C Gentry

James O Lowery

W Carl Jones

Alvan E Duke

This disclosure relates to a system for the continuous high speed production of non-metallic (NM) sheath cable from bare and insulated single strand conductors continuously produced in a high-speed tandem wire drawing and insulation operation. An automated material handling system is provided for transporting and conveying wire pack containers from coiling strands where the bare and insulated single strand wires are coiled into the containers to a station where the wires are continuously paid-out overhead from the wire pack containers and brought together in a jacketing line where PVC coating compound is extruded thereon. A sheathed cable is then coiled and packaged in a continuous manner. The depleted wire pack containers are then transported back to the coiling stands to close the material handling loop. The system is controlled by a programmable computer which controls the delivery of wire pack containers to various ones of a plurality of conveyor lines on a demand basis.

Method and apparatus for continuous production of NM cable

A method of and apparatus for automatically coiling predetermined lengths of multi-conductor electrical cable and packaging individually wound coils of cable are disclosed. A plurality of monitoring devices are arranged along the cable feed path to a coiling machine for continuously monitoring a number of selected parameters of the cable for defects and for generating fault signal outputs indicative of a predetermined variation from a standard value of the selected parameters. Successively wound coils are transferred from the coiling machine to a packaging machine where they are individually packaged, sealed and discharged. The fault signal outputs generated by the monitoring devices are transmitted to the packaging machine to automatically and positively identify a package containing a defective coil by disabling the package sealing mechanism. An electrical circuit is provided for discriminating between faults occurring in a coil being wound and faults occurring in a next successive coil to be wound.

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Carrollton, GA, United States of America

James F Holladay