Spring Manufacturing: From Forge Tongs to ABB Robots

Every car, truck and trailer rides on springs, and many of those springs still go through hot, heavy work before they reach an axle. Spring manufacturing turns steel bar or wire into parts that flex millions of times without breaking. This post follows the job from carriage makers and blacksmiths to coiling machines, then looks at the robot lines that shear, form and quench springs today. It also covers where ABB robots could fit in coiler tending, grinding, peening and testing, and what still slows automation down. Mattress springs are a separate topic, covered in our mattress manufacturing post.

Painted coil compression springs for trucks on show at the IAA trade fair in 2014. Photo: Spielvogel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How blacksmiths and carriage makers shaped springs by hand

Vehicle springs arrived with the carriage. Coiled springs appeared early in the 15th century in door locks, and the earliest known leaf springs were fitted to French carriages in the mid-17th century. By about 1750 wealthy owners in England and Germany rode on them too. Obadiah Elliott's 1804 patent on elliptical leaf springs is credited with the modern leaf spring. The physics had been written down earlier: in 1676 Robert Hooke stated that the force a spring exerts is proportional to how far it is stretched, a rule spring designers still use.

A three-quarter elliptic leaf spring under a horse carriage in Seville. Photo: Rios / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Making springs was smiths' work. In 1850 John Evans, a Welsh blacksmith and springmaker who had come to the United States in 1847, opened a shop in New Haven, Connecticut, that made flat springs for carriages and the machines to make them. A leaf spring takes many steps. The steel is taper rolled, trimmed, eye rolled and drilled, then heated in a furnace to around 850 to 950 °C, bent to camber, quenched in oil and tempered. For a long time people carried each hot leaf between those steps with tongs.

Two workers at a machine in the Bramber Spring Factory, Llwynypia, Wales, in November 1951. Photo: Geoff Charles / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Coil springs moved to machines. An auto-coiler feeds heated wire onto a spinning rod to form the coils, and the spring is then cooled in oil and tempered to remove brittleness. Cars moved largely to coil spring suspensions in the 1970s, while leaf springs stayed on heavy trucks, trailers and vans. Hand handling survived in plenty of plants anyway. In 2014 Oklahoma State University described how EMCO Industries in Claremore had moved leaf springs at 1,700 °F from a forming press with tongs, with five men working 15 minute shifts and taking turns all day.

A glowing hot coil spring being formed on a mandrel at Monroe Springs in Australia. Photo: Energy Saver / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Robots on today's spring lines

EMCO has since automated that work. On October 8, 2026, the company said its new 30,000 square foot plant in Claremore, Oklahoma, was online and making springs only for heavy-duty trailers. Twelve robots work in tandem along the line, taking raw bars of American steel through shearing, tapering, forming, heat treating and quenching. EMCO called it a multimillion-dollar investment that more than doubles its production capacity, and it expects about 20 new jobs in the area. The announcement did not name the robot brand.

The leaf sprung suspension of a three-axle flatbed semi-trailer built by Groenewegen. Photo: Bertux / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Other spring plants use robots in similar places. They load and unload coilers, presses and furnaces, carry hot parts to the quench and feed finishing machines. Wheelabrator's rotary spring peening machine handles up to 1,200 axial springs per hour and can be fitted with robotic loading and unloading. Peening improves the fatigue life of a spring, so it is a standard finishing step. ABB's IRB 6700 family, with payloads from 150 to 310 kg, can lift heavy leaf spring packs, and its Foundry Plus 2 option seals robots to IP67 so they can be cleaned with high pressure steam.

A white ABB foundry robot works in steam at a Buhler die casting cell. Photo: ABB

Smaller springs suit smaller arms. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot or an IRB 1300 could take finished springs from a CNC coiler, grind the ends square on a grinding machine, put parts in a load tester and sort out the rejects. We found no published case of an ABB robot in a spring plant, so treat this as a possibility. Cells like this are usually laid out and checked in RobotStudio before any steel is cut, which shortens the time a coiler stands idle while the robot is installed.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

What comes next for automated spring manufacturing

In factories, the next steps are fewer people near hot steel and more data on every spring. Trailer and truck makers want lighter springs that still pass fatigue tests, and that pushes plants to control tapering, heat treatment and peening more tightly. A robot holds every part the same way, so when a spring fails it is easier to trace the problem back to one furnace cycle. Cameras and load cells at the end of a line can check each spring's free length and rate before it is packed.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

At home, people meet springs inside cars, appliances and garage doors, and the change there is less visible. Appliance and car makers buy small springs in very large numbers at low cost, which favors automated coiling and inspection. The open problems are cost and changeover. A small spring shop may run many different parts, and each new part needs a gripper, a program and a safe layout. SafeMove can let people work near a robot without a full fence, which helps in a crowded shop.

Compression springs of many sizes and finishes in a display case. Photo: Snewart / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Skills are the last gap. Spring makers know steel, heat and tolerances, but many have never programmed a robot. ABB's Wizard easy programming for single-arm YuMi and GoFa, along with lead-through teaching, lowers that barrier, as our page on no-code robot control explains. Larger cells with heavy arms and furnaces still need trained integrators to design the guarding and tune the programs. Over the next few years, expect more plants like the new line in Claremore, where people set up the process and robots carry the hot, heavy parts.

ABB IRB 6620LX robots on an overhead rail tending CNC machines at DAU Componentes, Spain. Photo: ABB

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