The Brown Bayley steelworks,
The company occupied a 32-acre (130,000 m2) site.
"View of a 1950s Engineering Apprentice";
 |
Brown Bayley Steels was a steel-making company established in Sheffield, England in 1871, as Brown, Bayley & Dixon. They occupied a site on Leeds Road which was later occupied by the Don Valley sports stadium. The firm was founded by George Brown, Nephew of "John Brown" of the firm John Brown & Company. The firm manufactured Bessemer steel and railway tracks. [1]
Notable among its employees was Harry Brearley, the inventor of stainless steel. Brearley left Firths after a dispute over the patents and was offered a position at Brown Bayley, where he was appointed works manager and then became a director.
The company occupied a 32-acre (130,000 m2) site.
"View of a 1950s Engineering Apprentice";
| |
Scrap steel, loaded by overhead cranes using electromagnetic grabs into containers. These were fed into the Siemens Martin Open hearth furnaces via charging machines which tipped the “coffin-like" 6-foot-long (1.8 m)18-inch-wide (460 mm) loading containers directly into the furnaces. The furnaces were heated by water gas and coal gas made on site, and fed to the furnaces by 36-inch (910 mm) gas mains.
The molten steel had alloying metals added; after sampling and satisfactory laboratory confirmation of the molten metal's composition the furnaces were tapped out into preheated bottom-pouring ladles, which held some 20 tons of steel each. The ladles were manoeuvred by overhead crane into the casting bays where they were poured over several ceramic runner systems, which each fed six preheated one-ton ingot moulds. After cooling, the ingot moulds were stripped of the still hot ingots and taken to the ingot yard. In the 1950s the transport from the Open Hearth Casting Bays to the ingot yard was by steam lorry, or on the internal steam railway system. As of 2016, a fully restored original example of one of the steam lorries carrying the Brown Bayley livery can be found at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow.
After cooling and weathering selected ingots would be transported to the machine shop where they were placed on ingot planing machines to remove the scaled outer surface and allow examination for cracks and impurities. Impurities were gouged out with chisels using pneumatic “chipping hammers” or by manually operated swing frame grinding.
Electromagnets carried ingots to the skid pusher behind the reheat furnaces of No.1 Mill. These furnaces were again heated by on site-produced raw coal gas.
No1 Mill was a 30-inch (760 mm) reversing cogging mill driven by a several hundred horsepower electric motor through a Krupp gearbox. The cogging stand reduced the 12-inch-square (300 mm) section ingot to either slab or bar of 9-inch (230 mm) section. All hot material was moved at ground level on live roller paths. The second and third stands reduced material to either square or round bar of 4-inch (100 mm) section, or plate of 2-inch (51 mm) section.
The first stand had a hydraulic manipulator, which turned the material for rolling and also aligned it with a hydraulic accumulator driven hot shear, which cut off the red-hot ingot runner head of 9-inch-square (230 mm) section in 3 seconds. The manipulator then aligning the ingot with the reducing rolls making several passes to make the required section.
After rolling to the ordered section the red hot steel ran along ground level live roller paths to the hot saws or hot shears. The hot saws had a 4-foot-diameter (1.2 m) carbon steel saw blade similar to a woodworkers circular saw, but running with a constant cooling water spray to the teeth. These hot saws were capable of slicing through 4-inch (100 mm) bar in seconds with showers of sparks and the screaming metal emitting a noise of 110 decibels.
Hot shears also cropped the bar to length, but left indentations in the end of the bars, where hot sawing left a straight, clean cut. The bars were then lowered into cooling pits before being taken to heat treatment and bar-straightening machines.
Round bar straightening was done in machines known then as “Reelers” with a convex and concave roller paired together at an angle, the action of which both straightened and fed the bar whilst passing it through the machine. Again the entry chute to the machine was a lidded box built to contain the flailing bent bars which emitted a very loud rattling noise.
Electric arc furnaces also produced steels using scrap from “T’Top Bank”. Many tons of armaments arrived at the Top Bank for melting down, including Oerlikon and other anti aircraft guns which arrived by rail for destruction and recycling into steel for peaceful uses.
Two high-frequency electric furnaces produced one-ton melts of special steels in an area close to the main electric arc furnaces.
No6 Mill was a three-high rolling mill with several stands (Sets of Rolls) producing bar down to thick wire sizes from red hot billets taken from the reheat furnaces. The small diameter rod and bar produced in this mill snaked all over the cast iron floor plates. The operators used tongs to catch hold of the end of the red hot bar as it left the rolls, passed the bar around their body allowing it to loop out onto the floor and then entered the bar into the next pass position. In one hot summer the floor plates expanded, the expansion could not go anywhere and two plates buckled upwards like flagstones directing the hot metal into the air – within milliseconds there was no one on the mill floor as the metal reared up towards the roof and collapsed in a writhing heap as the mill rollers continued to spew out the rest of the bar.
An electric arc furnace (EAF) is a furnace that heats material by means of an electric arc.
Tinplate consists of sheets of steel coated with a thin layer of tin to impede rusting. Before the advent of cheap milled steel, the backing metal was wrought iron. While once more widely used, the primary use of tinplate now is the manufacture of tin cans.
Tinning is the process of thinly coating sheets of wrought iron or steel with tin, and the resulting product is known as tinplate. The term is also widely used for the different process of coating a metal with solder before soldering.
Continuous casting, also called strand casting, is the process whereby molten metal is solidified into a "semifinished" billet, bloom, or slab for subsequent rolling in the finishing mills. Prior to the introduction of continuous casting in the 1950s, steel was poured into stationary molds to form ingots. Since then, "continuous casting" has evolved to achieve improved yield, quality, productivity and cost efficiency. It allows lower-cost production of metal sections with better quality, due to the inherently lower costs of continuous, standardised production of a product, as well as providing increased control over the process through automation. This process is used most frequently to cast steel. Aluminium and copper are also continuously cast.
In metalworking, rolling is a metal forming process in which metal stock is passed through one or more pairs of rolls to reduce the thickness, to make the thickness uniform, and/or to impart a desired mechanical property. The concept is similar to the rolling of dough. Rolling is classified according to the temperature of the metal rolled. If the temperature of the metal is above its recrystallization temperature, then the process is known as hot rolling. If the temperature of the metal is below its recrystallization temperature, the process is known as cold rolling. In terms of usage, hot rolling processes more tonnage than any other manufacturing process, and cold rolling processes the most tonnage out of all cold working processes. Roll stands holding pairs of rolls are grouped together into rolling mills that can quickly process metal, typically steel, into products such as structural steel, bar stock, and rails. Most steel mills have rolling mill divisions that convert the semi-finished casting products into finished products.
Semi-finished casting products are intermediate castings produced in a steel mill that need further processing before being finished goods. There are four types: ingots, blooms, billets, and slabs.
The Butterley Company was an English manufacturing firm founded as Benjamin Outram and Company in 1790. Its subsidiaries existed until 2009.
The Park Gate Iron and Steel Company was a British company that smelted iron ore and turned it into rolled steel and semi-finished casting products. Its works was at Parkgate, South Yorkshire on a triangular site bounded on two sides by the main road between Rotherham and Barnsley (A633) and the North Midland Railway main line between Rotherham Masborough and Cudworth. It also operated ironstone quarries in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.
Mobarakeh Steel Company is a state owned Iranian steel company, located 65 km south west of Esfahan, near the city of Mobarakeh, Esfahan Province, Iran. It is the largest steel maker of MENA region, and one of the largest industrial complexes operating in Iran. It was commissioned after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and initiated operations during 1993. It underwent major revamping during year 2000, and is scheduled for a second and third revamping in 2009–2010, bringing the total steel output to 7,200,000 metric tons per year. The company owns the successful football club, Sepahan. In 2022, a parliamentary report indicated corruption of $3 billion, leading to the company being suspended from the Tehran stock exchange.
Edgar Allen and Company was a steel maker and engineer, which from the late 19th century was based at Imperial Steel Works, Tinsley, Sheffield, South Yorkshire. The site was bounded by Sheffield Road, Vulcan Road and the Sheffield District Railway to which it was connected.
The Fernald Feed Materials Production Center is a Superfund site located within Crosby Township in Hamilton County, Ohio, as well as Ross Township in Butler County, Ohio. It was a uranium processing facility located near the rural town of New Baltimore, about 20 miles (32 km) northwest of Cincinnati, which fabricated uranium fuel cores for the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex from 1951 to 1989. During that time, the plant produced 170,000 metric tons uranium (MTU) of metal products and 35,000 MTU of intermediate compounds, such as uranium trioxide and uranium tetrafluoride.
The Round Oak Steelworks was a steel production plant in Brierley Hill, West Midlands, England. It was founded in 1857 by Lord Ward, who later became, in 1860, The 1st Earl of Dudley, as an outlet for pig iron made in the nearby blast furnaces. During the Industrial Revolution, the majority of iron-making in the world was carried out within 32 kilometres of Round Oak. For the first decades of operation, the works produced wrought iron. However, in the 1890s, steelmaking was introduced. At its peak, thousands of people were employed at the works. The steelworks was the first in the United Kingdom to be converted to natural gas, which was supplied from the North Sea. The works were nationalized in 1951, privatized in 1953 and nationalized again in 1967 although the private firm Tube Investments continued to part manage the operations at the site. The steelworks closed in December 1982.
Steel, Peech and Tozer was a large steel maker with works situated at Ickles and Templeborough, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England.
McLouth Steel is a former integrated steel company. The company was once the ninth largest steelmaker in the United States and had three locations. The first plant was in Detroit, Michigan, the second in Trenton, Michigan, and the third, a cold mill, in Gibraltar, Michigan. The Detroit and Trenton plants have been demolished, while the Gibraltar plant has been purchased and restarted by Ferrolux.
Bar stock, also (colloquially) known as blank, slug or billet, is a common form of raw purified metal, used by industry to manufacture metal parts and products. Bar stock is available in a variety of extrusion shapes and lengths. The most common shapes are round, rectangular, square and hexagonal. A bar is characterised by an "enclosed invariant convex cross-section", meaning that pipes, angle stock and objects with varying diameter are not considered bar stock.
Yenakiyeve Iron and Steel Works Public Joint Stock Company (PJSC) “Yenakiyeve Iron and Steel Works” is an integrated steelmaking enterprise comprising OJSC "Yenakiyeve Iron and Steel Works" and JV "Metalen" LLC. Yenakiyeve Iron and Steel Works is a major employer of Yenakiieve town with the population of 140 thousand people. The Works is located in the vicinity of the railway station “Yenakiyeve” and in 60 km from Donetsk.
The Hunedoara steel works, formally ArcelorMittal Hunedoara and formerly the Hunedoara Ironworks, Hunedoara Steel Works, Siderurgica Hunedoara and Mittal Steel, is a steel mill in the Transylvanian city of Hunedoara, Romania.
The Bourne-Fuller Company in Cleveland, Ohio, was one of three constituent companies that formed the Republic Steel Corporation in 1930. The other companies were the Central Alloy Company and Republic Iron and Steel Company. The principal stockholder of Republic was Cyrus Eaton, a well-known financier who made a fortune, in part, through Republic Steel.
The Lithgow Blast Furnace is a heritage-listed former blast furnace and now park and visitor attraction at Inch Street, Lithgow, City of Lithgow, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1906 to 1907 by William Sandford Limited. It is also known as Eskbank Ironworks Blast Furnace site; Industrial Archaeological Site. The property is owned by Lithgow City Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.
The Eureka Iron & Steel Works was an American iron and steel company in Wyandotte, Michigan. It started in 1853 with the discovery of unusually high-quality iron ore in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A group of businessmen in the Detroit area figured this could be a profitable enterprise to manufacture iron and steel, so they pooled together funds to form a new company. The company produced the first commercially available steel in America. One of the first uses for this steel was tracks for railroads. It was in business until 1892.