Tapered Springs: 5 Things You Need to Know
Tapered springs are a special type of spring that belong to the compression spring family because of their compressing function. These special springs are more commonly called conical springs. Tapered springs come quite handy in tight spaces and when devices have special requirements that cannot be met by regular compression springs.
1. Conical Shape
Their helically tapered coiled shape gives them their name. Since tapered means to gradually lessen or diminish, it makes sense why these are called tapered springs. The gradually decreasing diameter of each coil produces a conical shape, hence the other name they go by: conical springs.
2. Reduce Buckling
The large outer diameter of a conical spring is usually on the bottom, providing great stability and reducing buckling or bending when compressed. Their cone shape length also reduces the need for longer spaces and the fact that their solid height can be telescoped down is a great advantage that other compression springs don't provide.
3. Telescope Effect
A telescope effect (also called nesting sometimes) is when the spring is compressed and the coils compress all the way down so that all the coils of the spring collapse inside themselves down to one wire diameter (the thickness of one wire) which allows for more travel or deflection.
4. Tapered Spring End Types
Just like compression springs, conical springs can have different types of ends. The difference is that unlike compression springs which have both ends the same size, conical springs will of course have a smaller outer coil and a larger one since the bottom coil is usually the one that is significantly larger. Still tapered springs can have open ends, closed ends, close and ground ends and even double closed ends. Learn more about each of these here: Compression Spring End Types.
5. Tapered Spring Dimensions
There are also other dimensions and measurements that vary from compression springs such as the pitch and rise angle of the coils and of course the inner and outer diameters in the coils vary from coil to coil as the conical spring’s coils are not all the same. You can learn more about these and other tapered spring dimensions that you need to take into consideration here: Tapered Spring Dimensions.