The Marvel City Mini Mill, as U.S.


Pipe’s new operation was dubbed, is the sports car of ductile iron pipe cast- ing facilities. Where the traditional plant (the sport utility vehicle of the industry) produces a variety of pipe types with varying diameters and wall thicknesses, the Mini Mill was designed to perform long and fast production runs of only a few types of pipe. “This is very people-focused,” Torok


said. “Anyone can buy the equipment we bought and arrange it. What will distinguish us over time is how suc- cessful we are with our workforce.” Since the facility’s commissioning,


that notion has been put to the test by changing economic conditions. U.S. Pipe’s new facility recently was asked to produce more pipe and more part numbers than it was originally intended to make. Fortunately, it has been up the challenge, in part because


it is able to crank out pipe with half the man hours per ton required at more traditional operations.


Market Forces and Beyond According to John Pensec, director


of communications for U.S. Pipe parent company Mueller Water Products Inc., Atlanta, the health of the company’s end markets is based on activity in three in- dustries—residential construction, non- residential construction and municipal spending (repair and replacement of water infrastructure). Pensec said U.S. Pipe’s operations specifi cally are most affected by residential construction and municipal spending. “We are seeing signs that residential construction may have hit bottom,” Pen- sec said. “Housing starts have rebounded slightly from historic lows. We are also seeing greater attention being paid to the need to repair or replace aging municipal water infrastructure systems.” Remember the housing boom? It


had been going strong for nearly a decade when it came to a screeching halt several years ago. “Housing starts declined almost 80% between 2006 and April 2009, when they were the lowest of any month for which data has been collected,” Pensec said. So when U.S. Pipe decided to build


a new ductile iron pipe plant to capi- talize on some untapped resources


in 2006, it was actually behind the economic growth curve, according to Steven Boyd, the company’s director of engineering services. “It was something we had been


wanting to do for a while,” Boyd said. “But we needed the right man- agement to push it through.” The formation of Mueller Water Products Inc. as a standalone company in 2006 helped drive the initiative. The strategy was simple—U.S. Pipe


was running furnaces at a variety of locations around the country for only 12 hours a day. But the giant cupolas each plant operates run most effi ciently when they melt iron 24 hours a day. Why not pair up a new plant with an old plant and use that continuous capacity to feed ductile iron pipe casting lines in both facilities? The new facility would increase the effi ciency of the plant on which it would piggyback, and it would allow U.S. Pipe to consolidate some of its less effi cient operations, specifi cally the Burlington, N.J., facility, which was closed in February 2008. (U.S. Pipe has maintained a distribution center in Burlington.) In late 2006, the search began for


a site on which to build the new generation of ductile iron pipe plant. The site that eventually won out was a brownfi eld location adjacent to U.S. Pipe’s existing facility in Bessemer,


Steven Boyd (inset) led the team that engineered the new U.S. Pipe metalcasting facility with the help of consulting fi rm EC&S. The facility was awarded Metalcaster of the Year honors for building the most advanced ductile pipe plant in the country.


MODERN CASTING / July 2010 17


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