Abstract
The Lean Manufacturing goal of reducing waste and increasing productivity has made it a
necessity to produce good quality products in manufacturing industries at a low cost. In the
cable manufacturing companies this can be achieved by optimising the wire drawing process.
One way to meet the desired quality of the drawn wires is to improve lubricant efficiency
through installation of an automatic, continuous lubricant fat content control system on the
drawing machine. The paper shows a method of finding the optimum lubricant concentration
for producing good quality copper wires using Taguchi experiments. Taguchi experiments are
employed to analyse the effects of different lubricant fat content levels on the tensile
strength and lubricant temperature. The results from the experiments indicated that the
tensile strength of the wire is affected by low lubricant fat content. The lower the lubricant
fat content: the lower the tensile strength drawing lubricant resulting in numerous wire
breakages that affect the quality of the final product, namely the cable.