Wire Forming & Coiling
Precision Mandrels, Wires and Tube Components for Medical Devices
Our wireforms and coils are produced using precision wires; to make products varying from continuous coils to support wires in medical devices, to small wire-end hooks for packaging mandrels and other special formed shapes.
Wires from 0.004” diameter to 0.080” diameter are generally used. Materials used include spring steel, stainless steel, titanium, tungsten, molybdenum and platinum-iridium alloy.
Wire Forms
Wire forming is a broad term for the process of bending, cutting, and shaping metal wire into custom shapes or components. It’s used across industries like automotive, aerospace, medical devices, and consumer goods to create everything from simple hooks and clips to complex structural parts.
Forming machines are used to create tension springs, torsion springs and wireforms. Bends and hoops are formed as well as a standard spring coil. For special applications, we manufacture our own custom wire forming machines, using pneumatic activators to hold, coil, bend and twist individual wires into their final shapes.
Spring Coiling
Coiling springs is a specialized subset of wire forming focused on creating helical springs—those spiral-shaped components that store and release energy.
Springs come in various types, like compression, extension, and torsion springs, each with distinct purposes.
Micro-springs are made by careful manipulation of the wire as it is fed through guides, then it is coiled backwards into a spring shape, which rotates as it grows in length to form the final coil length.
The wire is then cropped and the finished product.
While wire forming covers a wide range of shapes, coiling springs is all about an helical structure.
Wire forming might produce a flat zigzag or a 3D frame, but spring coiling sticks to the spiral, optimizing for elasticity and energy storage.
Micro-coiling
Most springs are made by cold winding, where wire is wrapped around a mandrel (a cylindrical tool) at room temperature. The wire is fed through a coiling machine, which controls the diameter, pitch (spacing between coils), and length. This is ideal for smaller springs and high precision coils.
Micro-coils are made in long lengths by winding fine wire, down to 0.001” diameter, around a mandrel on a specialist coil winding machine. Micro-coils are used to manufacture catheters, guide wires, electrodes or other specialised medical device components. We laser weld such micro-coils to rigid machined end fittings, rods or hypotube components.
The precision in spring coiling is wild—engineers use formulas like Hooke’s Law (F = -kx, where F is force, k is the spring constant, and x is displacement) to predict behavior. A tiny tweak in wire thickness or coil diameter can drastically change performance.
Laser Cutting Tube
An alternative method of manufacturing coils is by laser cutting hypotube. Laser cutting provides greater flexibility than the other methods described, as spiral cuts allow variable rigidity in the finished stainless steel coil.
Secondary Processing
Microcoils, springs, wireforms and laser cut tubes are often required to be grit blasted, PTFE coated or laser welded to neighbouring components in order for us to supply a finished product.