Cavert Wire Co.: Drawn to Recycling

This manufacturer, though potentially important to your operation, operates in a niche so narrow you might never know it exists--unless you’ve had trouble with baling wire.

By Jeff Borsecnik

Jeff Borsecnik is an associate editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.

Even if you run a baler packing paper, cans, or cardboard, you probably don't think much about baling wire. And even if you do think about it-at least enough to place an order when your supply is about to run dry-you likely figure wire is wire.

"But when you have a warehouse full of broken bales, that'll teach you real quick," says Josh Swimmer, vice president of marketing for Cavert Wire Co. (Uniontown, Pa.). He tells the story of one customer who put in a $350,000 baling system early this year, but figured wire is wire: "He shopped price-only on wire, bought from the lowest price, and had problems on day one with the wire's performance. That customer was so mad at himself when he came to us to get him out of trouble that I don't think he'll ever buy from anybody else again."

The Chemistry of It

To understand why the wire-is-wire philosophy doesn't hold true-without going through the experience of a warehouse full of broken bales-you need to take a look at the key characteristics of baling wire, Cavert maintains. These factors are strength, to handle the pressure required to hold a bale together, and elasticity, to withstand tying and stretch more than the bale expands when released from the baler.

Baling wire begins as carbon steel wire rod, and Cavert generally uses about five different grades with slightly varying chemistry. The chemistry, especially the carbon content-more carbon means stronger, but less elastic, wire-and annealing, a heat treatment process, are the main factors determining the physical characteristics of the wire.

At Cavert, wire is made or drawn to its final diameter by pulling the rod through a series of extremely hard, round tungsten-carbide dies, each pierced at its center by a hole precisely reamed and polished with diamond-studded pins. This squeezing and stretching process warms the wire to about 500'F. Because uncontrolled heat can affect the physical properties of the wire, causing production-disrupting breaks on the drawing machine or on down the production line--not to mention in your baler--the wire is briefly stored on slowly rotating water-cooled drums after each die. These spools, steadily fed and unloaded by accompanying pulleys, hold enough slack to allow play in the system in case the next stage in the drawing process is not moving at exactly the right pace to accommodate the moving wire, which travels faster as it gets thinner. This temporarily spooled wire also allows the operator a chance to weld another coil of wire rod to the end of the last one without stopping the entire drawing machine.

After it is slimmed to its final diameter, the wire is stored in lots of up to about a ton on carriers made of metal tubing.

The next step is annealing, a precisely controlled process that relieves stresses in the wire introduced in steelmaking or drawing. Though wire can be "batch annealed" on carriers, Cavert uses "strand annealing," in which dozens of strands of wire are fed continuously through a furnace, a method the company says ensures even heat treating and, hence, a product free of the inconsistencies that can cause bales to burst. The wire is steadily pulled off of neat rows of carriers and through an overhead network that directs it through the narrow, 40-foot-long furnace, which heats it to 1,400 degrees F.

Making Different Wires For Different Applications

Cavert manufactures two basic types of baling wire, black annealed and galvanized. Black annealed wire is simply drawn steel wire that has gone through heat treating. (Cavert claims to be the only baling wire maker that strand anneals this product.) It is sold as precut "single-loop" bale ties--the loops are designed to make tying easier--in lengths of 6 to 22 feet for use with manual tie balers, such as downstroke presses commonly used by grocery stores or small recyclers, and continuous coils of various lengths used to feed single-ram, automatic-tie horizontal balers. Except for cutting, end twisting for single-loop ties, and packaging, the black annealed wire is essentially ready for market once it emerges from the annealing furnace and cools.

The galvanized wire is made exclusively for two-ram, auto-tie balers, which are said to have a "very sensitive" tying system in which the wire moves rapidly through a track that must be free of dirt or debris--not an easy trick in scrap and waste baling operations, Swimmer explains. Still, galvanized wire reportedly picks up less dirt and slides more easily through the tracks. An added benefit is its resistance to corrosion, easing storage, Cavert maintains.

Through the annealing stage, the galvanized wire is the same animal as the black annealed type. But after emerging from the furnace, it goes through several additional steps: rapid cooling in a quenching bath, pickling--which cleans the metal--in hydrochloric acid, rinsing, and coating with a liquid flux. Then the wire is reheated, run through an 875 degree F bath of molten zinc, followed by a kind of Kevlar squeegee that ensures an even galvanizing layer, and, finally, coated with a wax that adds extra protection and lubrication.

From Cleaning to Drawing

When Meyer Swimmer, then head of a dry cleaning company, got into the wire business decades ago, he was thinking clothes hangers, a perfect complement to his other business. Before long, however, wire became his main business and clothes hanger manufacturing gave way to more-industrial wire products.

The transformation began in 1952 when he ran across Cavert Wire Co., established early in the century in Ellwood City, Pa., north of Pittsburgh, to produce innovative annealed "cross-head" bale ties for agricultural products. Meyer Swimmer, looking to ensure a supply of wire for his hanger-making/dry cleaning business, decided to purchase Cavert's wire-drawing equipment, and moved the machines to Oliver, Pa., one of about 80 "mining patches"--tiny mining company towns--near his home of Uniontown in Southwestern Pennsylvania's Fayette County. The equipment was installed in a brick bam built to house mules employed by the coal mines.

A few years later, Cavert Wire under its new ownership purchased Ace Baling Wire, a distributor with warehouses in Philadelphia and Secaucus, N.J. "Ace was probably one of the early factors determining our success," says Josh Swimmer. "Since the distributor became a locked-in customer, we were able to produce for other customers a little more economically, it gave us a little economy of scale." Getting into distribution also put Cavert more closely in touch with its market, he adds. "No longer would we get our market feedback filtered through a distributor, we'd get it right from the horse's mouth."

Its narrow focus on bale ties put Cavert in a position to take advantage of changes in the market. For example, the company was ready to help Munro Baler Co. develop wire for the first automatic-tie baler, a project that didn't interest the big steel/wire makers for whom bale ties were a minuscule and relatively unprofitable business segment. Though Munro eventually went bust, Cavert gained a small group of customers among Munro's early buyers and, more importantly, developed relationships with company engineers who later dispersed to other baler makers.

In the early 1970s, as Meyer's sons Wolford and Herbert were assuming responsibility for the company, changes in the steel industry opened new opportunities for Cavert. At that time, tight raw steel supplies were helping the booming steel business, prompting Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel--two of Cavert's major competitors--to analyze the profitability of all of their operations and shut down their bale tie businesses. Shortly thereafter, and for similar reasons, Cavert sold its hanger-making machines to focus on baling wire and began a 10-year stretch of 15-percent annual growth in sales. "We were able to maintain most of the distribution network U.S. Steel and Bethlehem had in place," says Swimmer. "Once we got to the mid-1980s, we were no doubt the prime supplier of this product in this country."

Getting Sophisticated

Following a sluggish period in the early 1980s, Cavert's growth resumed. By the end of the decade, sales were outstripping production, prompting construction of a new plant that quadrupled the company's production capacity.

The facility, built in Uniontown and completed in 1991, was outfitted with some of the most sophisticated wire-making equipment and environmental controls available, including an efficient 48-strand fluidized-bed continuous annealing furnace employing a new technology relying on hot sand supported on a cushion of pressurized air to transfer heat to the wire; an environmentally conscious fumeless pickling operation; a high-volume water recycling system; and a modem galvanizing line, which represented a new manufacturing area for the company-and a big investment that Swimmer calls "the riskiest thing we've ever done."

The new plant enabled Cavert to concentrate its coiled black annealed and galvanized wire operations in one facility with plenty of room for growth, while allowing the precut bale tie equipment to take over at the Oliver plant.

Thanks mostly to new technology, Cavert says it has been able to quadruple its production over the last 10 years without increasing the size of its work force of 105 (about half are production workers), .1 which has really been a necessity since our industry is a knock-down, drag-out, brutally competitive market," says Swimmer. "We are continually striving to make more for less."

Cavert produces around the clock, seven days a week. "But if you walk into McDonald's any time during the day, you'll find more people working there than you'll find on the floor here," says Terry Rack, Cavert's general manger of operations and engineering, with a sweeping gesture encompassing the spacious Uniontown plant. "People are surprised-we've got 130,000 square feet and only four or five people running it."

All of the company's manufacturing employees are basically trained to run all the equipment, giving the firm greater flexibility. The workers, in turn, get varied duties and a better understanding of the big picture. "We try to make it interesting for the operator," says Rack. "We want the worker as an individual to see he is a spoke of the wheel. We want input from him, and we want him to become part of the whole organization."

Changing Baling Needs

While Cavert's beginnings in baling centered on agricultural applications, the company's focus gradually shifted elsewhere in response to changes in the use of balers. In the 1960s, for example, retail stores began buying balers to help control their waste disposal costs. Meanwhile, scrap processors, many of whom had been generalists of a sort to date, were becoming more specialized, focusing on specific kinds of scrap and, as a result, purchasing more-specialized equipment, including balers.

Another boost to the baling wire business came from increasing waste disposal and transportation costs. On top of these changes, state "bottle bills" enacted in the 1980s brought the beverage container makers into baling in a big way, while processing of household recyclables grew thanks to additional legislation and the new public zeal for recycling.

Cavert has three main groups of customers: retail operations ranging from the local grocery store to huge national chain stores; "converting" plants, which bale the textile, paper, or metal scrap from which they stamp or cut their products; and scrap and waste processors.

Retail stores and small converting and recycling plants buy mostly single-loop bale ties. The rest of the black annealed wire goes to converting industry plants and small paper packers using horizontal, single-ram machines. The galvanized wire is used principally by large paper recyclers, material recovery facilities, and refuse baling operations that employ big two-ram machines.

With customers that buy wire by the individual 50-pound box and others that take truckloads, Cavert needs a variety of mechanisms to distribute. Large national sales, as well as service to local customers, are handled from Uniontown; regional markets are served from Cavert warehouses in Secaucus, Philadelphia, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Kokomo, Ind.-which gives the company the ability to provide next-day service to more than two-thirds of the country. And about 40 independent distributors fill the gaps and reach into Mexico and Canada. Cavert also "private labels" wire for sale by baler manufacturers.

As a result of its depth of experience in the business and sophisticated production facility feeding a well-balanced distribution system, the company has grown with the recycling and waste processing industries and won a healthy share of the baler wire market. Says Josh Swimmer-who, along with his brother, Cavert Chief Executive Officer Aaron Swimmer, has gradually taken over responsibility for the company from his father and uncle--"Our product ties over 150,000 bales a day--that's something to think about as you go to sleep." •