These early produced products include pipes, rods, wires and various other shapes. In today's time, other materials are extruded through forms such as magnesium, molybdenum, nickel, titanium, uranium, zirconium, and super alloys. There are many proven modern manufacturing techniques available to form metal products. Some of the most common methods used by today's manufactures are radial extrusion, impact extrusion, cold draw, forward extrusion, hydrostatic continuous extrusion, warm extrusion and hot extrusion. Of these, hot extrusion is the preferred choice to produce electrical wire.
Hot extrusion has many advantages over the other techniques for wire production.
The primary alloys used for electrical conductors are copper or aluminum based. With these soft alloys, this process provides an infinite number of possibilities for parallel surface applications. Grain microstructures improve due to the high heat and pressure needed for hot extrusion. Material flexibility and strength properties are well suited for electrical conductors after this process, but these properties can easily be changed by heat treating or cold working. This method of production is an economical way to produced wires because it is easily produced through high volume production and capable of maintaining tight tolerances.