Travel to Steel Warehouse Inc., Southbend, Indiana. Trip report, May 4, 1995

On May 4, 1995 the author visited a steel plate and coil, cold reduction facility at Steel Warehouse Inc. located in South Bend, Indiana about 150 miles from Argonne. Some very interesting facts were learned about cold reduction of hot rolled steel during this visit. The company selected is only a cold reduction mill and buys steel from a number of steel producers. The author spent a total of about three hours with these people, and this included a tour of their pickling line, the small cold reduction mill which at present is limited to 15.5 in width maximum, and their large cold reduction mill which produces sheet and coil up to 72 in. wide. Some of the things that were learned, that will have an impact on the production of the Atlas steel plates are given here. (1) Hot rolled coils have some inherent, interesting, characteristics that must be taken into consideration when being cold reduced. (2) The monitoring of the coil thickness is only done along the center line of the coil, this has a serious impact on QC of plates cut from this coil for a number of reasons. (3) Hot rolled coils of steel in this particular instance may come from a number of different sources. This could cause problems if magnetic permeability is a serious issue. It was the author`s impression that this facility is fairly typical of what one might expect from any similar facility