How Barbed Wire Is Made?

The manufacturing process of the barbed wire are 3 steps: making steel ingots, making wire and making barbed wire. Today, we will share how barbed wire is made.

 Step one: Making steel ingots 

1. Iron ore, coke, and limestone are heated in a blast furnace by hot pressurized air. 

2. To convert pig iron into steel, the impurities and most of the carbon must be removed Making billets.

3. A billet is a bar of steel with a square cross-section，the dimensions of which are usually less than about 6 *  6 inches (15*15 cm). 

Step two: Making wire 

4. The steel billet is again heated and rolled until it has been shaped into a round bar 0.2 inch (5.6 mm) in diameter, known as a wire rod.

5. Scale, a surface coating of iron oxide which forms on steel when it is heated, must be removed from the wire rod.

6. The clean wire rod is coated with borax, lime or phosphate. 

7. One end of the coated wire is shaped to a point. 

8. Drawing the wire makes it to become hard and stiff. In order to make it soft, it is heated, a process called annealing.

Step three: Making barbed wire

9. Wire to be made into barbed wire is usually coated with zinc (galvanized ) to protect it from corrosion. 

10. A single automated machine performs all the steps needed to transform galvanized wire into barbed wire.Two wires are fed into the machine and twisted together to form a cable. The other wire is fed into the machine from the side and twisted around one or both of the cable wires. This wire is cut at an angle on both sides to form a two-point barb. Two wires are twisted together if four-barb wire are needed.