The customer
The customer is an OEM that designs and manufactures buried utility locating instruments and video pipe inspection equipment, selling to businesses and municipalities in several countries. Mercury Wire has supplied the company for more than ten years.
The challenge
The company is always pushing its equipment to reach farther and give end users a better view. In sewer inspection, that means pushing the camera far enough down the line that the operator can see what’s actually causing a blockage. The push cable it had been buying from another vendor wasn’t keeping up.
Running through abrasive ceramic and clay pipe, that cable was wearing down faster than it should have, even though the conductors inside had to stay intact through constant pushing and pulling. Worn cable meant field repairs. Equipment came out of service in the middle of jobs, and the company’s customers faced expensive delays, including municipal and government clients working on fixed schedules. The cable also couldn’t push far enough down the line, which led to customer complaints of its own.
What Mercury did
Mercury’s team started by working directly with the company’s engineers to understand exactly why the existing cable was falling short. A push cable needs enough stiffness to travel a long way down a pipe and enough flexibility to get through bends and traps without breaking. Getting that balance right meant looking at the whole construction, not a single component. Working with the customer, Mercury evaluated different jacket materials, compared fiberglass core diameters, and reviewed the overall cable design. The goal was the combination of strength and flexibility that met the customer’s requirements: rugged enough for abrasive ceramic and clay pipe, while still able to push the distance the customer needed.
A dedicated push cable production cell
In addition to thoroughly evaluating the cable design, Mercury concluded that push cable construction was different enough from its other products to justify its own production system. Mercury set up a cell built specifically for push cable, with dedicated equipment chosen to give the best quality and performance. The cell has its own extruders, cablers, spoolers, and multiple braiders and shielders, along with a dedicated team, and it runs nothing else.
For this customer, the cell builds right-sized batches on demand instead of long runs that sit in inventory. That has meant short lead times, higher inventory turns, and less cash tied up in stock.
The outcome
A cell that builds only push cable runs the same equipment, the same setups, and the same people every day. Nothing gets reconfigured between unrelated products, and the team knows this cable thoroughly. The result is consistency. The cable built in one order matches the cable built in the last one, so the customer’s assemblers and field users get the same performance every time.
That consistency extends to delivery. Push cable doesn’t compete with other products for line time, so production is predictable and orders ship when the customer needs them. For an OEM planning its own builds, a supply it can count on, in what arrives and when it arrives, matters as much as the cable itself.
Mercury now supplies the company with a broader range of cable and assembly products beyond the original push cable.
If you’re working through a cable challenge of your own, send us your design or request a quote.