Steelmaking And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry by John P. Hoerr, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA , 19???, pp.304-305

Managing a steel plant is a difficult business. It is not a case of making steel correctly the first time and merely duplicating the procedure endlessly down the years. At the beginning of the process, the manager must marshal enormous amounts of raw materials&endash;iron ore, coke, and lime&endash;which are dumped into a blast furnace and come to a boil at 3,000°F. Men in asbestos suits tap the furnace, guiding the molten iron into a railroad car especially constructed so that it will not disintegrate under its freight’s fiery breath. A locomotive transports the "torpedo ladle" to the steel shop, where the molten metal is poured into another gargantuan vessel, a basic oxygen furnace in the most modern steel mills. Furnace operators add scrap steel and fluxes, roil the mixture around for about forty-five minutes at 2,800°F. and pour the contents into a ladle dangling from a crane hook. The crane moves the ladle, sirens screaming, across a wide expanse of shop floor and trickles it into a continuous caster. This is a channel several hundred feet long and shaped like a child’s sliding board that curves downward and levels out. As it creeps slowly down the channel, the steel hardens and emerges at the bottom in one of several different shapes, a slab or a bar or a bloom. If the plant doesn’t have a caster, men on the pouring platform pull the ladle plug and allow the molten steel to flow into ingot molds, where it sits cooling for several hours. Workers later strip away the molds and deposit the ingots in soaking pits&endash;sunken furnaces equipped with gas or oil burners&endash;where the steel is reheated to about 2,000°F to 2,450°F. to soften it for rolling. When the ingot reaches the right temperature, a crane snatches it out of the pit and lays it on a conveyor line. Snapping, crackling, throwing off scalding chips, the ingot moves into the jaws of a primary mill. The roller, manipulating levers and foot pedals, runs the ingot back and forth between sets of rolls. In a process not unlike squeezing the water out of a garment in an old-fashioned wringer, the steel is compressed and elongated into a slab (six to twenty-one inches thick by thirty-six to seventy-two inches wide) or a bloom (a smaller square shape), sheared off at the end, and passed on to other rolling mills for further refinements before it goes to the finishing mills. It may yet undergo a half dozen more reheating, rolling, piercing, extruding, welding, galvanizing, and chemical-treating processes, depending on the finished product. In making raw steel, these processes must be repeated from eight to ten times a shift, and in the rolling and finishing operations hundreds of times&endash;repeated without hurting anyone and avoiding undue stress on expensive equipment. Nothing ever happens exactly the same way. No two heats of steel turn out chemically identical; no two ingots have precisely the same properties. To manage such a process successfully, bringing the raw materials and supplies to the right place at the right time, keeping the equipment well maintained and the workers well motivated, dealing with dozens of variables&endash;to make all these things happen at the lowest possible cost, in the minimum amount of time, and yet produce the highest possible quality&endash;to do all of this successfully over and over and over is no small managerial feat.

	Updated on Saturday, 01-Jul-2000 18:10:46 MDT