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Manufacturing Process

Heading - Ball blanks are cold headed from rolls of wire. The heading machine cuts off a short cylinder of the material and a moving die with a concave spherical cup drives the cylinder into a matching cup in a fixed die. The result is a spherical shape, which is the ball blank.
Flashing - The flashing operation removes the slight band and small protrusions left on the surface by rolling them between the two hard alloy plates under high pressure.
Heat Treat - The balls are hardened, if required, by heating them to a high temperature in a furnace and then quenching them in a liquid bath.
Rough Grind - The hardened balls are precision ground by rolling them between the faces of a fixed iron plate and a very hard fine-grit grinding wheel.
Finish Lap - The hardened ground balls are then rolled between two cast iron plates. One plate is fixed while the other is rotated at a very low speed. This critical process determines the final quality of each precision ball. At this stage, the sphericity and size are established and carefully inspected to ABMA customer requirements.
Finishing/Cleaning - The final production operation cleans the finished balls and adds a shiny luster to them.
Final Inspection - Balls are gauged, visually inspected and subjected to other quality tests to insure every customer's specifications are achieved.
Packaging - The balls are packaged in accordance with customer specifications for shipping.