Heading

Ball blanks are cold headed from rolls of wire. The heading machine cuts off a short cylinder of the material and a moving die with a concave spherical cup drives the cylinder into a matching cup in a fixed die. The result is a spherical shape, which is the ball blank.

Flashing

The flashing operation removes the slight band and small protrusions left on the surface by rolling them between two hard alloy plates under high pressure.

Heat Treat

The balls are hardened, if required, by heating them to a high temperature in a furnace and then quenching them in a liquid bath. Samples are checked for hardness.

Rough Grind

The hardened balls are precision ground by rolling them between the faces of a fixed iron plate and a very hard fine-grit grinding wheel.

Finish  

The next step is the finish lapping operation. The hardened ground balls are rolled between two cast iron plates. One plate is fixed while the other is rotated at a very low speed. This critical process determines the final quality of each precision ball. At this stage, the sphericity and size are established and carefully inspected to customer requirements.

Finishing/Cleaning

The final production operation cleans the finished ball and adds a shiny luster to it.

Final Inspection

In-process inspections occur at each manufacturing step noted above. Additionally, in final inspection, balls are gauged, visually inspected and subjected to other quality tests to insure every customer's requirement is achieved.

Packaging

The balls are packaged in accordance with customer needs for shipping. Options range from generic plastic bags to custom glass bottles and moisture-resistant vapor barrier bags with heat sealing.