A utility for your rolling mill

After you’ve used a rolling mill for a bit you will notice that when
you roll something it doesn’t just get longer; it also gets a little
wider. The effect is more noticeable when the width to thickness
ratio is small, ie. between 1 and 4, say.

You can exploit this effect to make strip from square or round wire.
Suppose, for example, you want a 60mm strip, 2.5mm wide and 0.7mm
thick. If you roll 39.25mm of 1.64mm square wire lengthwise to 0.7mm
thick you get a strip 2.5mm wide and 60mm long. The problem is
predicting it. That’s where this utility comes in useful. It takes
the form of an Excel spreadsheet; you enter the width, thickness and
length of the strip you want and it tells you what length of square
or round wire to start with. If you don’t have square or round wire
of the correct size already, you just enter the size of the wire you
have and it tells you how much to cut off and roll to the required
square size before turning it into strip. In the example just given,
you probably wouldn’t have any 1.64mm square wire, but if you had 3mm
square you enter that and it tells you you need 11.67mm of square
wire that will roll down to 39.25mm of 1.64mm square wire, which then
rolls down to the required 60mm of 2.5mm strip. Get the program from

http://www.ganoksin.com/ftp/rolling.xls

I wrote it years ago in a strange program language and have recently
converted it into Excel 2003. I find it very useful, and hope you do
too.

Regards, Gary Wooding