Cable Drum Handling Robots: ABB in Cable Plants

Every cable that leaves a factory ends up wound on a drum, and for most of the industry's history people did the winding and lifting by hand. This post follows cable drum handling and the cable manufacturing robot from the hand-run wire mills of the early 1900s to the extrusion lines of today, where new plants from Southwire and Okonite are being built to keep up with demand for power cable. It looks at where robots already help at the end of the line, which ABB robots could take on coil packing and reel moves, and why the heaviest drums still belong to crane and forklift drivers.

Wooden cable drums with black power cable left at a Highland work site, Scotland, 2017. Photo: Jim Barton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How wire mills wound cable by hand

Early cable making was a chain of separate rooms. Copper rod was pulled through dies in a wire drawing plant, annealed and tinned in tanks, then carried to stranding and braiding machines. Photographs taken for the US government in 1917 and 1918 show Habirshaw Electric Cable in Yonkers, New York, and the US Rubber wire division in Bristol, Rhode Island, running long rows of these machines. Each one needed an operator to thread wire, watch for breaks and swap full spools for empty ones. Moving the spools between rooms meant carts, hoists and a lot of lifting.

A 61 spool cabling machine at the US Rubber Co. wire division in Bristol, Rhode Island, around 1918. Photo: United States Rubber Co. / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Insulation was the slow part. Rubber and textile braids went on in separate passes, and the finished cable was wound onto wooden drums by a take-up stand that someone had to stop, cut and restart for every drum. Companies that are still in the business today date from this period. Okonite, which is building its new plant in South Carolina, was founded in 1878 and is one of the oldest electrical wire insulating companies in the United States. In the photographs of those years the drum is already the unit of shipment, built from planks and bolts and rolled by hand across the yard.

The New York Insulated Wire Company factory in Wallingford, Connecticut, on a postcard from about 1910. Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Continuous processes changed that. Southwire opened in Carrollton, Georgia, in 1950 with 12 employees and three used machines. In the 1950s it built the Southwire Continuous Rod system, which casts and rolls metal straight into rod, first for aluminum and from 1963 for copper. That removed much of the stop and start at the front of the line. Extruders took over insulating, and long continuous vulcanization lines let insulation be applied and cured in one pass. Automatic take-ups that switch from a full reel to an empty one without stopping the line followed. Robots arrived late and mostly at the end of the line, where coils need to be wrapped, boxed and stacked.

Workers at a stranding machine in the stranding shop of Kabelwerk Oberspree, Berlin, 1959. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-73673-0001 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Cable plants are expanding and looking for hands

Demand for power cable has made cable plants a growth story again. In September 2026 Okonite announced a $400 million, 552,000 square foot plant on its site in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, for high voltage cable, with 105 jobs. Southwire announced a $256 million expansion in Starkville, Mississippi, adding about 380,000 square feet and 128 jobs, and broke ground there in early October. The company describes it as part of more than $2 billion in modernization across its sites. In Virginia, LS Cable & System plans a $689 million cable manufacturing complex in Chesapeake.

A reel of orange optical fibre cable waiting at a roadside in Muuratsalo, Finland, 2026. Photo: Antti Leppänen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

New plants are the cheapest moment to design in automation, and the handling around the line is where most of it goes. Small coils of building wire are wound, bagged and boxed at speeds where a palletizer such as the ABB IRB 660 or IRB 460 can stack cartons and layers all day. Heavier coils and smaller reels can be lifted by a large arm such as the IRB 6700 with a gripper that clamps the flange or the arbor hole. A collaborative arm like the GoFa CRB 15000 could cut test samples from a cable end, print and stick drum labels, or scan barcodes next to an operator. I have not seen ABB name a cable plant that uses its robots this way, so read this as a possibility.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Moving reels is the other big job. Empty reels go to the take-ups, full ones go to test bays and then to storage. An ABB Flexley Mover autonomous mobile robot can carry loads along a plant without fixed tracks or tape, which suits the trips between extrusion, test and packing for the smaller reels. Multi-ton drums of medium and high voltage cable will stay with cranes and heavy forklifts for now. ABB knows the product side too: it ran a high voltage cable business until it sold it to NKT in 2017. Cells for this kind of handling are usually laid out and checked first in RobotStudio, where reach and payload problems show up before steel is cut.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

Where cable handling robots go next

The next step is to connect the line to the warehouse. Take-ups, test stations, wrapping machines and mobile robots that share one schedule could send a finished reel from the extruder to a storage slot with no one touching it. Cutting to length comes after that. Customers order odd lengths, and rewinding and cutting cable from a master drum is still manual at many distributors. A robot that threads the cable end, feeds a measured length and tapes the coil would save a lot of walking. The wire harness assembly post covers the separate problem of routing cut wires once they reach a harness board.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Cable also shows up at home, on a smaller scale. Electricians and installers buy cable in boxes and on small spools that are already wound and packed by machine. Buyers mostly notice steadier supply and clearer labels on the box. Utilities and builders who order big drums care more about delivery dates, and those depend on how fast a plant can wind, test and ship. For factories the changes are bigger: a new plant can reserve floor space and power for robot cells from the start, while older plants have to fit them between machines that were installed decades ago.

Cable reels loaded on freight wagons at Bamberg station, Germany, 2017. Photo: Ermell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Drums vary in size and condition, wooden flanges splinter, and grippers have to cope with that. Heavy loads need safety zones, which ABB handles with SafeMove so people can work closer to a robot without a full fence, but the risk assessment still has to be done for every cell. Cost gets weighed against wages, and skills are short: someone has to program, maintain and adjust the cells as products change. The new jobs in Starkville and Orangeburg will include some of those roles.

A worn wooden reel of steel wire in Muurame, Finland. Photo: Antti Leppänen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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