Iron Giant.... 50K ton press back in service | The Tools of the Trade | Forum

I love the "Fifty"- but lets be clear- its socialist- it never would have been built except for big government. Now, me, I think thats a good thing, and exactly why and how government is good.

As for us "rapidly loosing our ability to manufacture"- well, the big government program that built this press ended in 1957.
55 years doesnt seem to "rapidly" to me.

I think if the US government spent some of Larry's Tax Dollars on a more tools like this, it would be great. (just kidding Larry, they can spend mine on it). This is what the Chinese, the Germans, the Koreans, the Japanese, and all our other big competitors do.
Its called an Industrial Policy, and we used to have one.
Now we dont.

We are still in the top 3 manufacturers in the world, though, only the Chinese and the Germans (damn socialists!) are ahead of us.

As for steel mills- Bill, you are a bit confused. Its true, we did send some older millso offshore, and they were reassembled.
But we have a huge domestic steel industry right now. We can and do produce millions of tons of steel a year. Actually close to 100 million tons.
Approximately 85% of the steel used in America is made in America. And we could make more- its just that at the bottom end- cheap rebar- its so cheap to buy imported stuff that we dont bother, and at the high end- tool and die steels, mostly- the Germans and Japanese sell us steel that is so good, and so expensive to make, that we dont bother to make it ourselves.

Interestingly enough, and, again, due to our lack of an Industrial Policy, many of the New steel mills built in the USA lately have been built by foreign companies, who see a big market here, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Between the Russians, the Germans, the Indians, the Chinese, and some misc. Europeans, there has been around $40 Billion spent on new steel mills in the USA in the last ten years- Thyssen Krupp is spending $5 Billion on one mill alone in Alabama right now. The Indians are building a huge Direct Reduction mill up in Northern Minnesota- pretty amazing technology that skips Basic Oxygen Furnaces, coke, limestone, and the last 150 years of steelmaking, and makes iron pellets direct from ore with natural gas.

Anyway, we have more capacity to make steel right now than we can use, and a lot of new mills.
We are still top dog in a whole lot of industrial categories, too.

Here is a sister press- the 50,000 ton Loewy in North Grafton Ma.
http://files.asme.org/ASMEORG/.....s/5662.pdf

Here's another counterintuitive fun fact- the total amount of our steel imports from China is around 5% of the steel we use.
But that is partially balanced by the fact that we EXPORT to China around $2 Billion worth of steel a year.
And I just read that we are currently at around 70% of capacity with our domestic production.

Both.
Currently, Nucor is the number one producer of steel in the USA, and it uses scrap exclusively. They make between 25 million and 30 million tons a year from scrap, depending on the economy. They make around 1/4 to 1/3 of all the steel made in america, again, depending on demand.

Again, I think its a good thing we recycle our own scrap, rather than sell it abroad, and Nucor has been at the forefront of the technology to make new steel from scrap.
nope, its not as nice, from a forging standpoint, as steel made from ore, but for most applications, its just fine. It uses less power and minerals to recycle.

The other two thirds of the new steel made in the USA is made from ore.
Unfortunately, much of this is made by foreign owned US mills. The Chinese and the Indians both have bought large taconite mines in Minnesota and surrounding states. The US owned mills are mostly the oldest technology- the Russians have been buying a lot of US mills lately- they own Sparrow Point, for example, and, like the Indian owned, Belgium based company ArecelorMittal, (the largest steel company in the world) they have been upgrading their US mills to be more efficient.

So- we make steel from ore, and we make steel from scrap. We actually recycle well over half of our own steel scrap, and export much less scrap steel than most people think, and most of the scrap we export does NOT go to China.

Back to the Fifty- Here are some great pictures of the Mesta Machine factory where they made the Fifty. Its still kind of in business, at a much smaller scale, as WHEMCO, in Homestead Pa. In its prime, it built steel mills, and factory equipment like the world has never seen.
http://images.library.pitt.edu.....c=hpichswp

I am just happy we have those presses- all 4 of the big dogs, 2 fifty thousand tons and 2 35 thousand tonners are still running.

As for where your steel is from- all you can do is ask. I ask my yard, and they tell me. Here in Washington, a lot of what we get is Nucor- we have a Nucor mill in West Seattle.
We also get a fair amount from the mills in Utah (Nucor, again) the Russian owned company EZRAZ which has mills in Portland Oregon and Colorado.

But in general, a local steelyard will buy from a variety of sources, and buy whats cheap. So rebar might come from Indonesia or Mexico, pipe might come from China or Korea, and aluminum might be French or Russian.

If you really want specific, american made steel, you can usually get it ordered in, but it will cost ya. Machinists often specify a particular mill and alloy, but they can pay triple what the run of the mill A36 costs for it.