PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
The American Steel Co. rolling mill
Where shaping a useful product starts/Gordon H. Geiger
cess, of whatever kind, but it has to be shaped into a useful product. This is al- ways accomplished on a rolling mill. Before the solid shape, be it an ingot (standard before the 1960’s), or a con- tinuously-cast slab, bloom, or billet (es- sentially 100 percent since the mid- 1990’s) can be rolled it has to be reheated to a uniform temperature. That temperature is on the order of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This was ac- complished, in the case of ingots, in a
A 42
ll steel companies start out with a solid form of steel from the melting and refining pro-
soaking pit. The ingot was stripped of its mold as soon as was practical, and the residual heat in it was utilized by placing it in the soaking pit as soon af- ter stripping as possible.
Rolling mills come in various types and sizes. Back when ingots were used, the initial
rolling mill was used to
break down the ingot to a semi-fin- ished shape, such as a square billet (less than 36 square inches cross-sec- tion), a bloom, (up to about 180 square inches), or a slab (usually no more than eight inches thick and as wide as the ingot could be made). These shapes
were then reheated a second time and finally sent to a finished rolling mill where they were, or are, as in the case of modern continuously-cast shapes, rolled into bars, plates, flat sheets, structural or tubular products. In the case of the HO scale American Steel Co. plant in River City on my lay- out, I chose to send the ingots from the electric furnace to a plate mill which rolls the ingots directly into heavy plate. To do that, I had to have a strip- per, a soaking pit, a scale breaker and a four-high rolling mill. This article will describe how I accomplished this.
MAY 2013
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