The next time you’re listening to someone play guitar — be it a big-name artist or your favorite local musician — there’s a good chance a critical part of their guitar string was made right here in Central New York.
United Wire Technologies produces the super-fine wires that wrap around about 80 percent of all guitar strings made and used in the United States. That means if you were to line up Chris Stapleton, Taylor Swift, Noah Kahan, Joe Bonamassa and Brandi Carlile, four of them are probably strumming something made just north of Oneida Lake.
Founded in 1938, United Wire is a fourth-generation manufacturing business in Constantia that keeps on hustling to defy the odds. They rebuilt after a devastating 2012 fire destroyed their equipment and building in Cleveland, N.Y. Fifteen years before that, the customer that accounted for 60 percent of United’s business decided to get the same product overseas instead.
But the Ransom family — father Jim, 82, his sons Don, 56, and Mike, 59, and Mike’s son, Nick, 25 — are always working to diversify their business, integrate technology, prioritize customer service and innovate in a space that continues to grow.
“You look at the market trends, and you see what’s going on, and you say, where’s your product set,” Jim Ransom said. “You have to know where you want to be in five years.”
When Jim’s father, Ellsworth Ransom started the company more than 85 years ago, which was then called Cleveland Textile, he made pot scrubbers and air cleaner car parts. Those first products were made of knitting wire, which is a mesh or nest made of wire that is knit or spun together.
After leaving the Marines, Jim Ransom took over in 1979 and soon realized the company’s future couldn’t rest on pot scrubbers. He saw the growing technologies around him, from the wires connecting cable boxes to homes and businesses to the modern components going into Cadillacs and Harley-Davidson motorcycles, two companies they’ve since done business with.
United Wire entered the music wire business in 1999 and its importance to their bottom line keeps growing. Mike Ransom said the company produces and ships more than 35,000 pounds of music wire per month — a staggering number when a good portion of the product is as fine and light as a strand of hair.
The 30,000-square-foot United Wire factory has a dizzying Willy Wonka quality to it with dozens of machines spinning, pulling, wrapping and stretching wire of various widths into spool after spool of finished product. The spools are as small as a football or as large as a coffee table; they sit on floor-to-ceiling shelves in a rainbow of shiny metallics.
The different colors come from the mix of metals in the wire, called alloys. They use copper, nickel, bronze, silver, zinc, steel and gold to create more than 20 types of wire used in everything from airplane parts for Boeing, to spinal cord stimulators, to the wire in the brush used to clean your grill.
Their music wire, which is wrapped around the core of a guitar string to create the finished product, accounts for about half of United’s business, Mike Ransom said.
They produce wire for some of the biggest names in the musical instrument business including Fender, Gibson, Ernie Ball, GHS and D’Addario. They also sell to smaller operations, including custom guitar-string makers who might just be one person in a workshop.
Different companies use different types of wires depending on the instrument. The alloy mix and the width of the wire affect the sound a string makes.
Walking the factory floor, Don and Mike Ransom point out spools of wire used for electric and acoustic guitars, mandolins and violins, to name a few. The Ransoms are protective of what goes into each, from the mix of the alloy to how they finish the product in order to make it strong but also pliable — and most importantly, sound good.
They hear from customers via the companies they work with that a musician, guitar or string maker wants to experiment with a different alloy or wire gauge to create a new sound. Research and development is a big part of their business.
“We work with our customers and develop whatever they need,” Mike Ransom said. “To stay competitive, we need to have the right equipment to keep quality product going out the door.
“The biggest thing is just customer service and being there for the customers. We’ll sell five pounds to this guy, or 10,000 to the next and we all treat them all the same.”
None of the Ransoms play guitar, but they all know wire. Before their machines could measure, calculate and report out via a computer screen what gauge wire it was spooling, Don Ransom said they’d have to do it by feel. Sometimes the difference is a hundredth of an inch.
When a customer rejects wire for some reason, they hunt down that reason and work to improve their product. The Ransoms say they are constantly experimenting with the various steps in their process. That combination is why they account for 80 percent of the music wire business in the United States, Jim Ransom said.
“If you build a good quality product and give good service, price is moot,” he said. “And we R&D a lot with our customers.”
Because their business is so niche, they are regularly trouble-shooting unique situations. A customer once ordered a continuous wire that United had to draw, temper and spool for three days non-stop.
Their biggest business hiccup? When the power goes out, Don Ransom said. A three-second outage will stop a machine that needs to be manually restarted quickly to avoid a pile of tangled spaghetti wire at the end of the line.
A new generation of wire makers
Nick Ransom graduated from Ithaca College three years ago with a degree in business. He worked at his family’s company plenty over the years but was often tasked with “not the greatest work,” he said laughing.
Today, he’s learning the company from the factory floor to making the schedule for its 32 employees.
He wouldn’t want it any other way.
“I was the only family member in this whole big family who actually wanted to do this, you know, had a passion for it,” Nick Ransom said. “I came right out of college, graduated, and the next day I was here working.”
United Wire, from its founding family to the machines on its factory floor, is a mix of the past and the present; old ways and new approaches.
One example is when they purchase used manufacturing equipment at auction — a hulking “rust bucket” that pulls or draws the wire, Mike Ransom said. They take that old machine, strip it down, rebuild it and add technology. So, a machine from the 1980s, which has an outer shell stronger than anything you can buy today, according to Don, now features a computer screen with a dozen buttons in as many colors.
Nick Ransom said that kind of innovation makes him enthusiastic about his career at United.
“I’m out there learning, from (his dad and uncle) and my grandfather and what they learned through the time they’ve been there,” Nick Ransom said. “The goal is these guys can go out and start doing more R&D and make it better and I’m on that journey with them. It’s a lot to learn but it’s cool to think about a small family business like this.”
The state of manufacturing
United Wire ships its product around the world in white boxes stamped with an American flag. They purchase a lot of their raw materials from overseas, which for about the last year, has come with a 50% tariff on copper. That means a spool that cost $50 a year ago now costs $75.
Jim Ransom said they’ve passed those costs along to customers, but it hasn’t hurt their business. They pay close attention to the metal markets and try and place bulk orders when prices are on the downswing.
“Market prices for copper are constantly changing every day,” Don Ransom said. “We have to pinpoint a time when we want to do a buy. Is copper down? It’s like you’re gambling.”
The Ransoms estimate their prices have increased about 20 percent in the last 18 months because of the tariffs and increased fuel costs, among other factors.
“A lot of (customers) understand the metal market,” Mike Ransom said. “They deal with freight costs as well. Gas is going up at the pump, but you still have to buy it.”
United Wire runs two, 10-hour shifts per day, four days per week with plans to extend those hours. You don’t need prior wire industry experience to work there, Don Ransom said.
When the company was looking for a new location after the fire in 2012, they stayed in Oswego County “because it has a good atmosphere for business,” Jim Ransom said.
Austin Wheelock, executive director of the nonprofit economic development organization Operation Oswego County, said his agency and the Oswego Industrial Development Agency helped United find a new location in Constantia and provided financial assistance in the form of a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) program and a revolving loan.
“They are a great representative of the type of business that we want to have continue to grow here in Oswego County,” Wheelock said. “They continue to adapt. They are a great story.
“If you heard the history of how they got started and what they’re doing now, it’s very different. They do stuff not just for guitar strings, they’re in the aerospace industry. They’re in some very cool spaces that you would just never know driving by that location.”
Jim Ransom is a member of the Operation Oswego County board of directors.
“The Ransom family is a great employer and a great steward of the county,” Wheelock said.
At 82, Jim Ransom said he does not have plans to retire. It’s obvious he enjoys looking out over the factory floor, knowing his family is by his side. Asked what his father would think of the vast expanse of humming machines making products that go around the globe, he smiled but didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, he wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.”