It is quite while since I visiting a cable
manufacturing facility. However, BICC certainly made
the complete cable in house. A single machine would
produce the copper wire from a large diameter ingot
and add the insulation. This was done at some hundreds
of feet per minute and included vats of molten
polyethylene. This was also true for multi-core cables
although these had multiple ingots and vats.
Nevertheless, production of a complete multi-core
cable was a single operation.
Coax was a different matter - the inner and dielectric
were made in a single operation, but the braiding was
applied later with an incredibly complicated machine
which wove the braiding wires round each other at a
pretty slow speed.
(I was involved with the design of a leaky feeder
cable for the mining industry. Because this used
spiral wires for the outside conductor it could be
done in a single operation. That is: Inner conductor;
dielectric; outer conductors; polyethylene sheath; PVC
sheath.) This cable was half the price of a comparable
coax purely because it could be done on a single
machine in a single operation.
73 Roger
VE3ZI
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