Large wooden spools

What counts as a large spool

On this site a large spool means a flange of 60 inches or more. Below that, most reels can be handled with an ordinary warehouse forklift. Above it, the reel is taller than a person, often wider than a pallet is long, and its weight calls for planned lifting. Sonoco lists nailed wood reels up to 116 inch flanges and Ely Reel builds up to 120 inches, but in the used market the common large sizes run from 60 to 96 inches.

These reels are almost always nailed wood with heavy 3 or 4-ply flanges. Plywood reels top out at around 60 inches in Sonoco's range. When full, many large reels leave the plant with lagging, wooden slats nailed around the outside of the cable, which tells you the reel was built heavy-duty from the start.

Large flange sizes and what they are used for

Height on the trailer

A reel loaded rolling, standing on its rim, is as tall as its flange. Many states, most of the East among them, cap a loaded truck at 13 feet 6 inches, and a standard flatbed deck sits around 5 feet off the road. So a 96 inch flange, which is 8 feet, on a standard flatbed comes to about 13 feet before blocking. That is close to the line.

Step-deck and drop-deck trailers sit lower, which is why the biggest reels often ride on them. A dry van limits you to what fits through the doors and under the roof, usually reels with flanges well under 9 feet that can be pushed or forked in. We pick the trailer type for the size before quoting, and tell you which one is coming so you can plan the unloading.

Eight to a trailer: what that does to freight

Sonoco's trailer figures put a full load of 96x60x42 reels at about 8. That one number explains most of what a large spool costs a buyer. Whatever the trailer costs to run from the seller to you, each reel carries an eighth of it. On small reels, where 200 fit, each carries a two-hundredth.

Two things follow. First, buying 8 large reels at once costs far less per reel than buying 2, because 2 reels on a trailer still pay for the trailer. Second, distance matters more than for small reels. We look for large-reel lots close to your site, and we tell you plainly when the freight is the biggest line on the quote.

Lifting and handling

A large reel should be lifted under both flanges or by a shaft through the arbor hole, never by the drum alone and never by forks under one flange. Forks need to reach right across the out-to-out width. If they don't, a spreader bar on a shaft through the arbor is the safer rig.

Rolling a large reel is fine on a firm, level surface if it is rolled in the direction the cable would pay off, and if someone controls it the whole way. On a slope or soft ground it is not. Once a reel is down, chock it on both sides or stand it on a flange. We note on every quote whether the reels will arrive stood on a flange or rolling on the rim, so you can have the right gear waiting.

What we check on a large reel

Large reels take more abuse than small ones: heavier cable, more crane lifts, longer trips. These are the points we write up for each reel in a large lot.

• Arbor hole: round, not split, and with any steel arbor plates still fastened.
• Flange plies: no cracks running through a ply, no boards lifted at the rim.
• Staves: count of missing or loose staves; Service Wire's own return rule is at least 75% intact.
• Drive holes: not torn out, since large reels often turn on driven stands.
• Bolts or tie rods, where fitted: present and tight.
• Stencil: size, maker and any weight figure, photographed.

How much cable a large spool holds

Big flanges don't automatically mean big footage. Large reels usually have big drums too, because heavy cable can't be bent tightly, and the drum takes up space the cable could have used. The working sum is the volume between the drum and the flange rim, less a clearance at the rim, divided by the space each foot of cable needs.

In inches, that is roughly 0.0654 x (usable flange squared minus drum squared) x traverse, divided by the cable diameter squared, which gives feet. With an inch of clearance at the rim, a 96x60x42 works out to about 6,900 feet of 2 inch cable, and a 72x48x36 to about 2,800 feet. Those are upper bounds for a perfectly level wind; cable makers derate them, and a crew winding recovered cable by hand will get less. Check yours with the capacity calculator before you settle on a size.

Who buys large spools

Utilities and their contractors are the main buyers, for taking up recovered cable or holding spare runs. EEI members invested a record $178.2 billion in 2024 and project more than $1.1 trillion from 2025 to 2029, and the EIA counted $11.8 billion on underground lines alone in 2023, so large reels keep turning over. Wire rope shops and marine cable users buy them too, along with cable plants that need a few reels to finish a run.

If you are one of those buyers, the quickest quote comes from the size, the count, the delivery ZIP and a line on what lifts the reels off the truck at your end. The request form on this page asks for each.