At Meridian Cable our tag line is “Off Shore ­ In Spec ­ On Time™” and we specialize in custom coil cords and custom cable assemblies.  Since most products we build are designed, tooled and built exclusively for our customer’s many folks believe our lead times would be quite long.  This is far from the truth.

Recently Meridian Cable was fortunate enough to work with a new customer who was in a bit of a pinch.  This company was in Hawaii filming a sequel to a major motion picture, and they needed some custom coil cords fast.

The common perception is lead times from China, where our wholly owned factory is located, are months long.  We shipped this order in less than one month from first contact.

Our new customer found us through an internet search, sent us an email and we had a quote to them in 2 days.  Again this is a custom coil cord and not something we keep in stock.  If this had been one of our stock coil cords we could have shipped the same day.  We designed, costed and quoted this product in 2 days, and then proceeded to deliver them to the customer in less than 4 weeks.

To put some perspective on how quick this is, an explanation of how a coil cord is made will help.  The first step is to build the inner conductors.  This starts by taking individual copper strands and combining them to make the gauge wire needed.  Step two is to cover this wire with an insulation material such as PE, HDPE, PP or PVC.  In step three we combined three 26 gauge wires and a 24 gauge drain wire together in a bundle.  Step four was braiding whereby the wire bundle is cover in a shield made up of 64 inter woven strands.  In step five we did the final extrusion with PU, polyurethane.  All these steps just made the raw cable; we still had to make the coil cord.

Coiling cable involves winding the raw cable around a metal rod.  The size of the rod and length of the winding will determine the size of the final product.  After winding the rods are put through a heat treating and cooling process to make sure the raw cable holds the curly cord shape that gives the product its retractablity.

Then all we had to do was ship the product, from China to Hawaii, where our customer was on location shooting their film.

All this was done in less than 4 weeks.  This is what “Off Shore ­ In Spec ­ On Time™” means at Meridian Cable.  Call or email us and see how we can help solve your custom coil cord or cable assembly needs.

Bud Kinzalow ­ Meridian Cable