avicmr-steel.com 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 coils 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.