William Sommerwerck wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:

Speaking of steel mills... Do you remember the tax break American steel
companies got back in the '70s? Do you remember what they did with it?

When was this? I spent part of the '70s in the US Army.

It was during the Carter administration. The steel industry got one-time tax
breaks, so it could upgrade its facilities to remain competitive. Instead,
the steel companies used the money to buy other companies that were doing
well, so they could give their stockholders a better return.

In other words, the steel companies viewed themselves as being in business
to make profits for their stockholders, rather than to manufacture and sell
steel.


Armco spent wads of money to maintain the Middletown plants, and
managed to exceed the design specs for online time between rebuilds.
Also, it was around that time they started to develop the technology to
manufacture graphite composite materials to add new products to their
metal building division, as well as to sell to their regular Steel
customers. They developed a lot of custom steels over the years,
including the special stainless used by Aeronca to make the original
honeycomb steel heat shield for the early space program. The other was
the aluminized stainless they developed for catalytic converters. Their
corporate research center was in Middletown, and the old mill was used
to make specialty steels, while the newer, automated mill made steel for
the big three auto makers, and most of the white goods manufacturers.
They had a huge slag pit where a subsidiary dumped the cargo from a
steady steam of slag haulers and train cars from the Hamilton, Ohio
plant. The slag was used to build road beds all over SW Ohio.

They also had coke plants, to convert coal to coke. They recovered as
much unburnt gas as they could, and burnt it in the blast furnaces. and
used so much liquid oxygen that the supplier had to build a new oxygen
reduction plant. It was assembled in large sections in England, shipped
to the Mississippi, where it was transferred to barges and hauled to the
Ohio river, and finally to a dock in Delhi TOwnship, just outside of
Cincinnati. The sections were put on a 40 axle, 4000 HP crawler with a
top speed of 5 MPH. it took days to move it to Middletown. A lot of
cable TV, telephone and power lines had to be temporarily raised, or
disconnected for the crawlers to pass.

They wanted to update their other plants to the level of automation
of the Middletown plant, but the union didn't want it to happen.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida