EDITORIAL


Bieber vs. Clapton: A Metalcasting Takeaway


the recording charts over the last year. Don’t worry, until a month ago I hadn’t heard of


M


him either. My music taste leans more toward Eric Clapton. Now in the twilight of his career, Clapton is considered one of the greatest guitarists and most influential rock legends of all time. Recently, Bieber and Clapton were pitted against


each other in my house, as my wife and preteen attended a sold-out concert for the teen heartthrob one night and my wife and I attended a Clapton event the next. One is a YouTube sensation. The other began his career when a color television was a sensation. One has a fan base of teen and preteen girls. The other’s fan base has teenage grand chil- dren. But both artists’ careers provide insight to metalcasters related to two of the articles in this issue: the U.S. Pipe Metal- caster of the Year profile on p. 16 and the rapid prototyping (RP) and additive manufactur- ing (AM) feature on p. 30. U.S. Pipe is the Eric Clapton


of the metalcasting industry. This metalcaster has been steady in production and philosophy, following tried and true methods to ensure success and profitability in its more than 100 years of existence. But, when faced with ad- versity, the firm also has proactively reacted to the marketplace and adjusted itself to better compete, such as with the recent re-engineering of its new nearly $50 million plant. While Clapton went from blues to rock and then


fused the two together through his career, U.S. Pipe went from being a jobbing pipe caster (historically) to creating a “mini-mill” focused on long produc- tion runs and low part numbers to a fused mini- mill job shop caster that must handle both short and long run pipe production. While mini-mill job shop pipe production wasn’t initially believed to be the ideal production flow for U.S. Pipe’s new metalcasting facility, the recent economic recession


MODERN CASTING / July 2010


y 12-year-old daughter loves Justin Bieber. For those of you not familiar with the newest teen music sensation, he is a 16-year-old Canadian discov- ered on YouTube who has raced up


forced the metalcaster to call an audible after it had engineered and built the brownfield. By focusing on lean manufacturing techniques, the mini-mill has found a way to re-engineer its environment and provide its parent facility with significant efficiencies that have allowed it to consolidate operations. RP and AM are the Justin Bieber of the metalcasting world (in a good way). As a whole, metalcasting hasn’t embraced RP and AM. While there are a variety of reasons for this (expense being a big one), there also seems to be a new RP/AM manufacturing technology for metalcasting every year (just like there is a new teen music sensation every year) with little staying power. While continuing redevelopment is common


“U.S. Pipe is the Eric Clapton of the metalcasting industry.”


in younger, technology-driven industries like RP/ AM, it isn’t the norm for mature industries like metalcasting and probably scares us off. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t em- brace it to a greater extent. Just like the music industry embraces a new teen sensation each year, we must see RP/AM as another way to shorten the production cycle and move closer to our


customers. As the economy comes back the next few years, our capacity will fill and lead times will grow. Maybe RP/AM presents us a tool to shorten those lead times and achieve a leg up on the competition. So, from now on, when I load Clapton into my


iPod, I’ll try to load a Justin Bieber song as well. I may just hear the future of metalcasting.


Alfred T. Spada, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief


If you have any comments about this editorial or any other item that appears in MODERN CASTING, email me at aspada@afsinc.org.


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