Wire Rope
 Wire Rope
Wire Ropes

6x19 & 6x36

Rotation-Resistant

Premium Value

Swaged

Specialty Small Ropes

Wire Rope Slings

Single Part Body

Grommet

 Wire Rope
 Support
Rope Selection

Construction

Classifications

Special Construction

Cores

Basic Types

Lay

Measuring Dia.

Rope Inspection and Removal

Inspection

What to Look For

Wear/Abuse

Removal Criteria

Extending Rope Service

Warnings


Support: Rope Selection:
Strands and Construction

Wires are the basic building blocks of wire rope.  They lay around a "center" in a specified pattern in one or more layers to form a strand.  The strands lay around a core to form a wire rope.  The strands provide all the tensile strength of a fiber core rope and over 90% of the strength of a wire rope with an independent wire rope core.

Characteristics like fatigue resistance and resistance to abrasion are directly affected by the design of strands.  In most strands with two or more layers of wires, inner layers support outer layers in such a manner that all wires may slide and adjust freely when the rope bends.  As a general rule, a rope that has strands made up of a few large wires will be more abrasion resistant and less fatigue resistant than a rope of the same size made up of strands with many smaller wires.

Some basic strand constructions:

cablcrs1.gif (2086 bytes)

Single Layer.  The most common example of the single layer construction is a 7-wire strand.  It has a single-wire center with six wires of the same diameter around it.

 

cablcrs2.gif (2552 bytes)

Seale.  This construction has two layers of wires around a center wire with the same number of wires in each layer.  All wires in each layer are the same diameter.  The strand is designed so that the large outer wires rest in the valleys between the small inner wires.

 

cablcrs3.gif (2512 bytes)

Filler Wire.  This construction has two layers of uniform-size wire around a center wire with the inner layer having half the number of wires as the outer layer.  Small filler wires, equal in number to the inner layer, are laid in the valleys of the inner layer.

 

cablcrs4.gif (2376 bytes)

Warrington.  This construction has two layers with one diameter of wire in the inner layer, and two diameters of wire alternating large and small in the outer layer.  The larger outer-layer wires rest in the valleys, and the smaller ones on the crowns, of the inner layer.

 

cablcrs5.gif (2952 bytes)

Combined patterns.  When a strand is formed in a single operation using two or more of the above constructions, it is referred to as a "combined pattern."