I made steel from the time I got out of high school for over 35 years for the investment cast industry. We melted scrap, plus raw materials, and processed it in another vessel, with the only power in the vessel being Oxygen. It would combine with carbon, aluminum, and silicon, to burn them off, and produces heat, which keeps the bath molten. We did 20,000 pounds at at time. After we got the alloy in spec, we would put it in a ladle, and put it over a casting machine, that looked similar to this one, only we cast a solid bar of metal 75 mm in diameter, roughly 3". From there, the red hot bar was cut with a moving cutoff saw into 15 foot long bars, and carried to a shear press, cut into 18" parts, and carried thought a tank of water that cooled them. From there, they went into a blast cabinet which blasted them with steel shot, and then they were printed with a heat number and alloy, and packed for shipment. All this was done, from melting to packing and ready for shipping, within about 6 hours. It is something neat to see, if you have not ever been in a steel melt shop. We also had huge domes that we had furnaces under, and melted under high vacuum, for alloy that goes into jet airplane engines.
Fascinating. I had no idea they made ductile pipe that way.
ReplyDeleteA lot of these old manufacturing processes just blow my mind.
ReplyDeletePeople have no idea how the world really works.
Imagine getting that to work for the first time. There would have been some real pucker factor there.
I made steel from the time I got out of high school for over 35 years for the investment cast industry. We melted scrap, plus raw materials, and processed it in another vessel, with the only power in the vessel being Oxygen. It would combine with carbon, aluminum, and silicon, to burn them off, and produces heat, which keeps the bath molten. We did 20,000 pounds at at time.
ReplyDeleteAfter we got the alloy in spec, we would put it in a ladle, and put it over a casting machine, that looked similar to this one, only we cast a solid bar of metal 75 mm in diameter, roughly 3".
From there, the red hot bar was cut with a moving cutoff saw into 15 foot long bars, and carried to a shear press, cut into 18" parts, and carried thought a tank of water that cooled them.
From there, they went into a blast cabinet which blasted them with steel shot, and then they were printed with a heat number and alloy, and packed for shipment.
All this was done, from melting to packing and ready for shipping, within about 6 hours.
It is something neat to see, if you have not ever been in a steel melt shop. We also had huge domes that we had furnaces under, and melted under high vacuum, for alloy that goes into jet airplane engines.