Heavy-duty reels for oil, gas and marine cable

Who uses reels in oil, gas and marine work

Sonoco, one of the largest reel makers, lists oil, gas and marine cable among the products its nailed wood reels carry, alongside power, telecom, building and elevator cable. The cable in this trade is some of the heaviest per foot in use: armored power cable for drilling rigs and offshore platforms, cable for electric submersible pumps in producing wells, instrument and control cable for refineries and petrochemical units, cathodic protection cable along pipelines, and shipboard and shore power cable for yards and ports.

Wire rope rides on wood too. Rigging shops, crane operators, mooring and towing crews, dredges and drilling contractors all buy rope on reels, and the federal wire rope specification RR-W-410 says rope is to be furnished on reels unless the order says otherwise.

Heavy cable needs a bigger drum

Armor and metal sheaths set the drum. The NEMA WC 26 minimums Anixter reprints call for a drum at least 16 times the cable diameter for wire armored and flat tape armored cable, 14 times for interlocked armor, lead sheath and corrugated sheath, and 25 to 30 times for aluminum sheath. A 2 inch wire armored cable therefore needs a 32 inch drum, which in the published tables means a 66 inch reel with a 36 inch drum or larger. Okonite's reel table, which rates each reel by the weight of cable it carries, shows how fast weight climbs: a 54x32x26 is rated for about 3,000 lb in its lighter build and 6,500 lb in its heavier one.

Southwire's packaging sheet has a reel series for exactly this: its C series nailed wood reels are reinforced for copper and steel. Its C-22 is a 42x24x24 at about 167 lb and its C-29 a 46x24x24 at about 250 lb, both with 3.125 inch arbor holes.

Lagged reels and what the lagging tells you

Full reels in this trade usually leave the plant lagged: wooden slats nailed around the outside of the flanges to protect the cable from forklifts, chains and weather. Southwire's sheet lists four package protection types under NEMA WC 26: Type I with no covering, Type II with a solid fiberboard overwrap, Type III with several layers of fiberboard, and Type IV with wood lags. Okonite's bulletin lists NEMA's covering classes the same way, with Class 4, extra heavy duty, as wood lagging or a double wrap of solid fiberboard.

On an empty reel, lagging leaves its marks. Nail holes all around the flange rims mean the reel left the plant heavy-duty. Lagging nails left in the rim are a hazard and a grading note; they snag the next cable and tear gloves. We ask sellers to pull them or tell us they are there.

Wire rope reels and the K factor

Rope shops figure reel capacity with a formula of their own: L = (A + D) x A x B x K, where L is rope length in feet, A the depth of rope space in inches, D the drum diameter, B the width between flanges, and K a constant for the rope size. Paducah Rigging's worked example puts 1 1/4 inch rope on a reel with a 36 inch flange, a 24 inch drum and 30 inches between flanges: (6 + 24) x 6 x 30 x 0.152 gives 821 ft, with no clearance taken off. Industrial Rope advises about 2 inches of clearance unless end fittings need more, and Kulkoni at least one rope diameter.

With 2 inches of clearance, a 48x28x24 reel has 10 inches of rope space and a 60x28x28 has 14. The table gives approximate rope lengths for those two reels using the published K factors.

Where the empties end up

Along the Gulf Coast the reels follow Interstate 10: refineries and petrochemical plants from the Houston Ship Channel through Beaumont and Lake Charles, offshore supply bases around Port Fourchon and Houma, and fabrication and shipbuilding yards from Louisiana to Mobile and Pascagoula. Inland, they collect at drilling contractors' yards in the Permian Basin and other producing regions, and at pipeline construction laydown areas.

A rig move, a refinery turnaround or a vessel delivery leaves a batch of heavy reels in one place at one time. Few cable makers take those back. Service Wire's free return covers only its own labelled 30 to 72 inch nailed reels in full truckloads; Sonoco's EcoReel needs a truckload of viable reels. The rest stay unless someone buys them.

Buying and selling heavy reels with us

Sellers: write the lot up by flange x traverse x drum and count, note which reels were lagged and whether the nails are out, and tell us if any reels are steel, which usually go back to their maker. Offshore bases and plants often need a safety orientation or escort for a truck; tell us before we schedule.

Buyers: tell us the cable or rope diameter, its weight per foot and the length you need to wind, and whether you need the heavy build. We check the drum against NEMA's multiples, the footage against the formula and the weight against the reel's rating before quoting, and we look for a lot close to you, because heavy reels are expensive to move far.

• Arbor hole sound and round; full reels over 2,500 lb gross need a bushing or plate under MIL-DTL-12000
• Flange plies tight, with no cracks from the arbor to the rim
• Staves present; Service Wire's 75% rule is a useful minimum
• Lagging nails pulled from the rim
• Salt exposure noted for reels stored at waterfront yards