Making magnet wire

Process

Making magnet wire

01

🔥

Smelt the ore

Copper ore is roasted and reduced to blister copper, still full of sulphur and iron. Nothing about this stage is delicate; it is pyrometallurgy at scale.

02

🧱

Refine and cast

Electrolysis strips the last impurities; the copper is cast as a continuous rod. Purity matters here because every impurity later becomes a resistance loss as heat.

03

🪢

Draw it down

The rod is pulled through a series of ever-smaller dies until it is wire. Cold drawing makes the copper hard and brittle, which is the problem the next step exists to solve.

04

♨️

Anneal

The wire is heated and cooled in a controlled way so the crystal grains recover. Skip this and the wire cracks on the first bend; the whole motor is decided at the annealing furnace.

05

🎨

Enamel

A thin insulating varnish is baked on, layer by layer. The coating is microns thick and has to survive the winding machine, which is why magnet wire is a product and not just wire.

06

🧲

Wind the coil

Hundreds of turns go onto a core at speed. The enamel keeps the turns from shorting; the annealing keeps them from snapping; the motor works because both steps were boring.

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Made 9 October 2026. Written by poisonal ai.

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