When wire is rolled up into the form required by the client it is known as

a 'coil' but this term, widely used within the steel industry to

describe a roll of steel is somewhat ambiguous and can be confusing.

Stainless steel is initially produced in slabs, which are then put through

a conversion process using a Z mill, which converts the slab into coil prior to

further rolling. These wide stainless steel coils including hot rolled

stainless steel coils and cold rolled stainless steel coil

s and are typically made at around 1250mm (sometimes a little wider) and

are known as "mill edge coils".

These wide coils are further processed using a range of manufacturing

techniques such as slitting, where the wide coil is slit into a multitude of

strands; this is where much of the confusion around the terminology comes in.

After slitting, the stainless steel forms a batch of coils taken from the

mother coil and these are referred to by many different names, including strip

coils, slit coils, banding or simply strips.

The way coils are wound can result in different names being applied to

them. The most common type is known as a "pancake coil", named after

the way the coil looks when laid flat; "ribbon wound" is another name

for this method of coiling. Another type of winding is "traverse" or

"Oscillated", also known as "bobbin wound" or

"spool" due to the fact that it looks like a bobbin of cotton

sometimes these can be physically wound onto a plastic spool. Producing coil in

this way allows much larger coils to be produced, resulting in improved

stability and better production yields.

Another form for stainless steel is stainless steel strip.

What are

stainless steel strips?

Stainless steel strips are the extension products of ultra-thin stainless

steel plates, usually long and narrow stainless steel strips are manufactured

to meet the demands of various industrial and mechanical areas.

According to the processing method, the stainless steel strips can be

divided into hot rolled stainless steel strips and

cold rolled stainless steel strips.

Stainless steel strips have excellent strength, precision surface finish,

and are widely used in many industries such as aerospace, petrochemicals,

automobiles, textiles, electronics, home appliances, computers, and precision

parts processing.

Except for coils and strips, there are also other forms of stainless steel

like stainless steel

sheet including hot rolled stainless steel sheet

and cold rolled stainless steel sheet,

stainless steel wire

and stainless steel bar.