The quality package for a spring shipment, assembled from your records for your quality manager to sign.

A spring's paper trail starts at the wire mill and ends at the load tester. A coil arrives with a certificate and a tag. The lot gets coiled, stress relieved, maybe shot peened, ground or plated, and tested at the lengths or angles the print calls for. Your quality manager gathers all of it, sees that each record really belongs to this lot, and signs.

In the test, AI reads copies of those records for lots you already shipped and assembles the package in the order your customer expects: readings by lot, wire material certificate, heat treatment and plating records, the print's stated requirements, and a list of what is missing or won't tie to the lot. It marks no reading as passing or failing, and it never opens a live certificate.

Each wire specification lists different tests. ASTM's published summaries name tension, wrap and torsion tests for A228 music wire, tension, wrap and surface tests for A229, and wrap, coil uniformity and bend tests for A313 stainless, whose tensile requirements also speak to wire after a prescribed heat treatment. A1000's summary brings in eddy current testing along with etched surface, decarburization and inclusion content. A mill certificate can be genuine and still report a different set of tests from the ones a customer's specification names. The package lists what the certificate reports beside what the print cites, ties the heat or coil number to the tag and the job, and leaves any difference for your quality manager.

The order of operations decides what a reading means. Machinery's Handbook lays out why the sequence matters. Compression springs are baked after coiling to relieve residual stress, and baking an extension spring takes away some of its initial tension. Outside diameters shrink on music wire and carbon and alloy steels and grow on 18-8 stainless. Hooks and torsion arms shift with heat. Plated springs are baked before plating and again after it to relieve hydrogen embrittlement. So a load reading with no place in that sequence, or a plating record with no later bake on file, is among the first things the package lists. It doesn't say what either one means.

Shot peening keeps its own numbers. The Institute of Spring Technology names the Almen arc rise as the main control on peening intensity and says the specified value is the one reached at saturation, with type A or thinner type N strips chosen to suit the shot stream. Where a print calls for peening, the package looks for the strip type, the arc height and the date in your record, and names whichever isn't there.

A reading needs its conditions and its tester. ISO 22705's three parts cover measurement and test methods for cold formed compression, extension and torsion springs, and each leaves out dynamic testing. A torsion reading is empty without its angle; the handbook writes one as a torque at a stated deflection, and a compression load tolerance runs on deflection from free length. ASTM E4 covers force calibration and verification of static or quasi-static testing machines, wants its force standards calibrated under ASTM E74, and leaves the buyer, owner or user to designate which indicators get verified. The package records each reading's length or angle, its units, the tester that took it and the verification date on file.

Buyers set the paper. ASTM A125, for hot-coiled helical compression springs from bar 3/8 inch and larger, lists supplementary requirements S1 to S8 that apply only when the purchaser specifies them. A Railway News summary of UIC Leaflet 822, for rail vehicle springs, describes batch-based certification, and says EN 13298 requires unit-specific marking for safety-critical components. One account's lot certificate is another's spring-by-spring file. Your reviewer, usually your quality manager, will check that each record ties to the right lot, each requirement from the print and PO appears, and every gap got named instead of filled. Standards are cited for context, and nothing here is legal or engineering advice.

When your reviewer says yes, each new lot that ships with paper gets the same package for about 30 days.

Your quality manager reviews, corrects and signs every package before it goes anywhere, and every reading stays with the people who took it.

Any job after that is your decision, at its own price, with monthly support once one is running.