SCS UPDATE - January 2006

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Heidtman Steel of Toledo, Ohio is on a winning streak -- a 51 year winning streak. Since its founding in 1954, this family-owned business has made strategic investments in facilities, equipment and alliances that fueled its growth to become the largest privately-owned flat-rolled steel service center network in the USA. Today, Heidtman operates 15 processing facilities serving over 1200 customers.

The newest Heidtman facility is an addition to its Butler, Indiana location. That building is now home to an RBI Stretcher-Leveler

Heidtman Steel's Win Streak -
How SCS Helps Keep It Going

New Oscillation Feature Lowers
SCS Variable Cost

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producing ultra-flat sheets in strong demand by Heidtman customers who laser cut. This June, it will also house an SCS Sheet Line, becoming the world's fourth location producing stretcher leveled SCS sheets.

Greg Goad, Heidtman's Central Region VP oversees the sprawling Butler complex and recently shared his thoughts on Heidtman's success and how SCS will extend that success:

"Heidtman has always been a 'prudent pioneer' of technology and business initiatives. The motto of our recent milestone was '50 years on the cutting edge' and that's true. We pioneered high strength low alloy sheet steel to

Greg Goad, Heidtman Steel's Vice President for the Central Region, with the mammoth RBI Stretcher-Leveler Cut-to-Length line behind him: "The way we manage our assets and invest in new ones, like SCS, gives us healthy, organic growth. Customers appreciate that progressiveness and stability."	help automotive customers reach their goals for cutting vehicle weight while enhancing safety. We strategically locate and equip our plants to control costs. Most of our centers are next to
	mills eliminating inbound freight.

We do our own pickling at these centers to manage that cost. These strategies work together to let us provide our customers with higher value products at lower costs."

Goad sees Heidtman's investment in SCS technology as an extension of the 'prudent pioneering' philosophy: "SCS solves problems -- not for us directly, but for our customers. This means it creates opportunities for us. That's why we became a joint venture partner in the first SCS Coil Line with TMW. Being involved so early lets us fully understand SCS as a product. It's in our racks and our catalogs and we get to be the one to introduce it to customers in our region. Our application engineers get to work with SCS and understand where it can solve particular problems a manufacturer is struggling with. So when we start producing SCS here in the heart of our sales territory -- this summer in Butler and next winter with the SCS Coil Line in Delta ,Ohio (a joint venture with Fulton County Processing and Kelco Metals) - we have a huge advantage over competitors just waking up to SCS."

Goad continued: "Acceptance of SCS among our customers has been phenomenal, especially considering the freight charges attached to trucking it to northern Indiana, Ohio and Michigan from Red Bud, Illinois. These customers understand that when we're producing in Butler and Delta those freight charges go away, but the benefits stay. They're hooked on the faster laser cutting and plasma cutting speeds with SCS. One of our customers is getting 60% faster plasma cutting with SCS! But mostly they just love that it's so clean and dry, especially the smaller shops that don't have all the high-end paint prep and cleaning."

With seven continuous HCL pickling lines, Heidtman Steel has the most pickling capacity of any flat-rolled service center in the USA. Is Goad concerned that the Butler SCS line will erode their pickling business? "Not at all," he states, "the Butler SCS line gives us a whole new dimension in serving our customers. We put in the Stretcher-Leveler to meet the growing demand for laser-flat steel that doesn't spring back. SCS'ing those stretched sheets lets us offer a product that will also laser faster. Again, it's using new technology to solve a problem that's common to many of our current and potential customers, so how can we lose? If we're the only producer of SCS in our region, and we're showing customers how it can help lower their costs, we stand to gain more orders. That's how being a prudent pioneer pays off."

The SCS Sheet Line and SCS Coil Line at TMW continue to be excellent "laboratories" techniques and collecting/assessing performance data. An area of particular interest

SCS Brush Machine Oscillation Feature

This animation shows how the entire base of the SCS Brushing Unit moves back and forth to distribute contact more uniformly across the entire surface of the brush. This "oscillation" feature, adapted from the SCS Coil Line, will increase the useful life of each brush, further reducing the cost to operate an SCS Sheet Line.

for refining operational
has been the SCS brushes

since they are a key component of SCS variable cost.

Our readers will recall the announcement of a new "bristle style" of brush a year ago (January 2005 Issue). A year of operation with this bristle style has demonstrated its longer service life. (Note that "service life" factors in "dressing" the brush. SCS brushes are engineered tools that you want to get maximum use from. When bristle wear becomes too uneven across the length of the brush, the brush assembly is returned to the manufacturer to have the bristles recut to uniform length. This is called dressing the brush.)

However, there remained another problem with brush life for the SCS Sheet Line. Since sheets are usually placed on centerline of the conveyors and SCS Brushing Unit, bristles in the center of the brush wear faster than those toward the edge. This prompts a more frequent need for dressing. The problem is compounded because the leading edge of a sheet is really tough on the brushes, wearing them down faster than a continuous strip would.

Borrowing SCS Coil Line Technology
The SCS Coil Line was designed to move the Brushing Unit back-and-forth, perpendicular to the flow of material (see the video). This works since the brushes are wider than the material they're moving across. The back-and-forth oscillation of the Brushing Unit evens out wear across the brush to extend service life.

TMW and RBI engineers felt this same oscillation feature could be applied to the SCS Sheet Line and extend brush life there as well. The implementation would be different -- the Brush Unit would not oscillate continuously like on the SCS Coil Line. Instead, the operator would position the Brushing Unit where it should be placed to even out wear based on the width of material he is running. Doing this correctly for different widths of material (different jobs) over time would distribute wear more evenly across the brush.

However, with oscillation enabled you wouldn't always feed sheets on the centerline of the Brushing Unit. This raised a concern that existing uneven wear in the brushes might tend to drag the sheets one way or another as they traversed the Brushing Unit. If that happened, it would be very difficult to "manage" brush wear with the oscillation feature. Also the sheets would not emerge onto the exit conveyor where the operator wanted them to.

Tests were conducted to simulate extreme situations, where rather narrow sheets -- some only 16 inches wide -- were fed both on center and far off center of TMW's SCS Sheet Line. The brushes used for this test had significant wear in the center and very little wear toward the edges, representing a worst case situation. The result? The sheets came through cleanly and in line with how they were fed. They were not dragged off track by the uneven wear of the brushes. This shows that an oscillation feature in an SCS Sheet Line will work very well.

Significant Reduction in Brush Costs
Between the new brush style and this oscillation capability, brush life for the SCS Sheet Line will be extended significantly over that of the original design. The need for dressing of brushes can be reduced and possibly eliminated. We project a roughly 40% reduction in the variable cost of SCS brushes, depending on product mix.

This important savings in a major component of SCS variable costs extends the already impressive SCS economic advantage for processors. That's a benefit SCS producers and users should both enjoy, therefore RBI will be implementing the oscillation feature on new SCS Sheet Lines beginning with Heidtman's Butler Line.