An industrial cabling machine for the SSC

The SSC project will need the manufacturing of some 25,000 kilometers of keystoned flat cable. The technical specifications of the various cables to be produced are the result of five years of research and development work at LBL. An experimental cable machine was built and run in the laboratory; many improvements were implemented and tested. Semi-industrial production of the various cables was performed, and the resulting cables were used and tested in the one-meter model magnets and 17.5 meter dipole prototypes. From these experiments an industrial cabler specification was generated and used for an international RFQ. The winner of the contract is Dour Metal, a Belgium company that built the first industrial prototype which is now in a production line at New England Electric Wire Company. In this paper we describe the main characteristics of the machine and give the first industrial production results of superconducting keystoned cable for the SSC project. 4 refs