A wire rope is not a bundle of wires. It is a machine with several thousand moving parts, every one of them sliding against its neighbours under load. It starts with rod. High-carbon steel, around 0.7 to 0.85 percent carbon, is patented in a lead bath to force a fine pearlite structure, then cold-drawn through a train of tungsten carbide dies until it emerges as wire holding 1770 to 2160 MPa. That drawn wire is stronger than almost any structural steel ever poured. Then the braiding begins, and the machinery gets strange. - Tubular stranders spin an entire barrel of bobbins about the rope axis, past a thousand revolutions a minute, wire feeding through a hollow central shaft - Planetary stranders hang each bobbin in a gimbal so it counter-rotates as the cage turns, laying the wire in a helix without twisting it about its own axis - Preforming heads bend every wire and strand into its finished helix before it reaches the closing die, so a cut end sits still instead of exploding into ...