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JDM Steel Service located in Chicago Heights, Illinois, is now offering ultra-clean, rust-inhibitive SCS coils. The JDM SCS Coil Line, only the second in the USA, began operation last month. SCS Product Manager Ed Wynn (left) and Gene Puk ,VP Operations, show off the third coil produced on the JDM line.

For the remarkable SCS surface and super-flat material shape, contact JDM Steel Service at:
           708-371-1300
If you have children or grandchildren, chances are you’ve used products from Ultra Play Systems – you just didn’t know the name. Ultra Play builds premium fixed outdoor playground and athletic equipment and fixed outdoor seating and tables. School playgrounds, community ball fields and outdoor dining pavilions across the US, Canada and Caribbean use Ultra Play’s popular, durable products.

But manufacturing items used for people’s enjoyment isn’t all fun and games. It’s an intensely competitive business. That’s what Mike Moll, who owns Ultra Play with partner Ray Delaney,		 Mixing Work, Play & Productivity

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has learned since they purchased the business in 1998. “Top notch quality is just the price of admission in this industry,” explains Moll, an industrial engineer with 24 years experience in all facets of fabrication. “After all, the product lives outdoors, gets climbed on, kicked and generally abused. If it doesn’t hold up and look good for years, our order stream will dry up.”

Ultra Play’s order stream is flowing. Since Moll and Delaney took over, the company has grown from 12 to over 50 employees and added several new product lines. In 2001, it began offering thermoplastic-coated seating and tables – extremely popular, but a challenge to finish. Moll points out, “Steel covered by thermoplastic only gets a single stage pretreatment, so it’s got to have good adhesion and
        The First Stage Fabrication team discusses requirements for a new
        job to run on their Finnpower 33 ton turret punch press. From the left:
        Kraig Kelley - Operator, Scott Dilley - GM and Mike Moll - President.		       a very smooth, unblemished surface.
     Not many suppliers can consistently
     deliver the material quality needed to
     meet the product’s standards.”
In 2003, a nearby business, The Material Works, asked Moll if he would paint samples of their ‘experimental’ new steel on Ultra Play’s top-of-the-line powder coat system. After painting, the samples were to be lab-tested for adhesion and corrosion resistance. Moll was happy to oblige and intrigued by the properties of this steel called SCS. “The fact that it was so smooth, clean and rust-inhibitive made it ideal for our products. The fact that it had no oil made it wonderful for our processes. We do sawing, bending, drilling, punching and welding, so the steel gets handled a lot. The oil on the P&O we used fouls the shop and gets wiped off in handling, which invites rust.”

Still, Moll was skeptical SCS would work for Ultra Play until he saw the results of the salt spray tests he had painted samples for. “We have lean paint prep – a heated iron phosphate wash followed by an ambient water rinse. We maintain the chemistry of that wash very carefully to get the good adhesion and corrosion resistance our products require. So when those SCS samples matched the P&O samples in the salt spray tests, I told my steel suppliers to start stocking SCS.
We’ve switched all of our sheet steel to SCS. Now, we go twice as long before we change out our pretreatment wash solution, yet we can say with confidence we are getting better adhesion and better durability than we did before SCS. That’s true for both our powder coat and our thermoplastic. With SCS we’ve also reduced noxious welding fumes and no longer have to pre-clean weld areas to remove extra heavy oil film.”

What was the cost of switching to SCS? Mike Moll grins and remarks, “Switching to SCS saved us money. On the material buy it costs less than the P&O we were getting. It raised our shop productivity and lowered our reject rate. And we put out an even better product with SCS. Better product at lower cost. Now, my mission is to get our suppliers using SCS. We buy a lot of tube and a lot of angle and we want it all to be SCS.”
Moll has a second mission. It’s his new contract fabrication business called First Stage Fabrication, Inc. First Stage features a state-of-the-art 33 ton turret punch press that processes sheets up to 60” x 100” x 0.250”. The twist is the turret press and its operators are located at TMW (see photo above).

“That was a nice way for TMW to thank us for painting their SCS samples,” Moll chuckles. “But seriously, here's why the TMW location makes so much sense: Ultra Play outsources its punching, and we looked at buying a press, but just didn’t have the volume to justify it. We also want all our punched sheets to be SCS. Are we completely unique in this regard? I don't think so.

Bargeloads of steel get processed at TMW and a lot of it ends up on a turret press somewhere, right? And other fabricators should appreciate the convenience of having their SCS sheets punched right at the source. We see these other fabricators pooling their volume with Ultra Play's volume to fill up the machine. Those who get on board stand to benefit in three ways: lower freight, quicker delivery and the punched sheets will be SCS."

How do other SCS customers get on board? "They need to call TMW for a quote to have their sheets punched on one of the newest, most accurate turret presses in the country. They’ll be delighted with the quality of our work and the pro-customer attitude of our team. Our goal is to keep them as happy as a kid on a playground."


When we say the SCS process makes ordinary hot-rolled black rust-inhibitive without the need for oil or coatings, we’re often asked ‘Just what is the shelf life of SCS? How long can I store it before signs of corrosion will appear?’ Good questions for which there is no definitive answer because it depends on the specific storage conditions.

The more easily answered question is ‘How does SCS compare to P&O in its ability to inhibit rusting?’  That can be reliably determined with through controlled testing, and we recently enlisted the help of St. Louis Testing Laboratories to perform such a test. The test used samples of bare SCS, samples of P&O that had been pickled in a continuous in-line process and samples of P&O that had been batch (immersion) pickled. Three samples of each group were used in the testing with both sets of P&O samples retaining the protective oil coating that is routinely applied right after pickling.

All samples were placed in a high humidity environment  – 98% relative humidity at 100°F. At regular intervals, the samples were removed and visually inspected for signs of rust formation. If no rust was observed, they were returned to the high humidity chamber for further exposure.

Through approximately 200 hours, no samples showed any sign of rust. At the 312 hour inspection interval, both the continuous P&O and the batch P&O samples began to show slight levels of reddish-colored corrosion. The SCS samples did not. At the 384 hour inspection, the batch P&O samples showed pervasive rust spots, while the continuous P&O samples began showing noticeable edge rust (see photos
at right). Again, no signs of rust on the SCS samples.

Signs of rust began to appear on the SCS samples at the 504 hour inspection (see photo). But the rusting was limited to the edges of the samples that had been cut on a shear. This pattern indicates that the impact of the shear blade disrupted the SCS’ thin layer of polished scale, thus diminishing its ability to resist rusting in that specific location.

A complete synopsis of this comparative humidity testing is available at this link and clearly documents the SCS advantage: SCS samples achieved 60% greater exposure before developing rust than oil-protected P&O samples. Had the SCS sample edges not been sheared, the exposure levels may well have been even higher.

We hope this result gives you, the reader, a clearer idea of what is meant by the statement SCS is ‘rust-inhibitive’ and how that can translate into a shelf-life advantage and a scrap reduction advantage when you replace your P&O with SCS.

   Copyright 2007 The Material Works, Ltd.