Olympic Steel Inc., Bedford Heights, Ohio, a steel distributor with 15 locations across the central and Eastern regions of the United States, recently brought new life--and new offerings--to its Plymouth, Minn., service center with a blanking line and stretcher leveler from Red Bud Industries, Red Bud, Ill.

Olympic Steel’s Minnesota operations handle material in a variety of formats, including hot-rolled and pickled and oiled carbon coil, hot-rolled carbon plate, cold-rolled coil and sheet, and stainless and aluminum sheet. The Red Bud line fulfills a multitude of tasks with its in-line stage and load system, dual stub uncoiler, crop shear, stretcher leveler, heavy-gauge grip feed, variable rake shear and heavy-gauge drop stacker.

  To answer the needs of all customers that call Olympic their supplier, the service center chose a heavy-duty blanking line. It has the capability to process coils up to 0.375 inch thick and up to 72 inches wide. Coils can weigh as much as 60,000 pounds.

"The reason that we chose Red Bud’s stretcher leveler line for the Minneapolis facility and the reason that it was a good fit is threefold," says Steve Mallory, vice president at Olympic. "First, it was a great fit for the marketplace in terms of what’s purchased in this area. It’s also a good fit for the size of our facility in terms of its output. And it’s a good fit from a quality standpoint in terms of the flatness required by the customer base in this geography."

Flat and happy
The stretcher leveler is the equipment’s lifeblood when it comes to delivering material devoid of warps, edge waves and center buckle. With Red Bud technology, the equipment produces material that meets the flatness demands of customers that perform sophisticated forming and fabricating operations, such as laser cutting, notching, punching, shearing and welding. No matter the condition of the coil, material will look flat and stay flat, even during processing that can sometimes release stresses that were not eliminated through other leveling methods.

The local marketplace, the line’s output capabilities and the flatness the Red Bud equipment can produce were all major driving points for Olympic’s investment. Giving its customers more choices was also essential. The Red Bud line complements products already available from Olympic’s other locations. In addition to offering flat, stretcher-leveled material, Olympic also can provide flat material processed on one of its temper mills located at its Bettendorf, Iowa, and Cleveland facilities. Coupling the two processes together under the Olympic umbrella fulfills a wide range of customer requests.

  "The impetus for getting the line was that it augmented our existing equipment at other locations, particularly the temper mill in Iowa," says Mallory. "Now, we’re really the only service center that I know of in the United States or North America that has the ability to produce product with either the temper mill process or the stretcher leveler process. Therefore, that enhances the value to our customers in whichever process best suits them."

The frustration that can come when processing material that doesn’t meet customers’ flatness demands is something with which Olympic can sympathize. Mallory mentions that although the stretcher leveler was brought on board to fit the needs of Olympic’s customers, it also serves the company’s internal demands for laser cutting, which Olympic does in-house. For the 24 lasers that Olympic operates--and in Mallory’s region alone, which has 14 lasers that produce products--the Red Bud equipment is well-suited. The more sophisticated the cutting or processing, the more demands that are put on the material.

"It keeps us in the high end of quality business," he says. "Conventional leveling doesn’t satisfy that need anymore. And you really have to have some enhanced leveling capabilities, whether it be temper milling or stretcher leveling."

Ahead of the curve
Red Bud developed the technology long before customers truly needed it. Those asking for the company’s patented stretcher leveler material by name, which Vice President of Sales and Marketing Dean Linders says happens more than Red Bud ever would have expected, are usually processing their steel on a laser. Lasers didn’t find popularity until the mid-1990s. Red Bud developed its stretcher leveler 10 years before that.

And the stretcher leveler does just what its name says. The material is gripped at the end and stretched beyond its yield point, resulting in material that is thoroughly flat.

"During the leveling process, no matter the technology, the goal is to elongate the strip," says Linders. "If you have a wavy edge or a center buckle, you’re trying to make the short portions of the strip longer. We haven’t figured out how to make the long stuff short again so our only option is to make the short stuff longer. Stretcher leveling elongates the strip, not by bending it using rolls but by giving it a good tug. The amount of elongation depends on how long the stroke is set on your cylinders. It’s a simple process but it does a good job of making flat material that stays flat. It will rehabilitate the material."

The catastrophes that can occur when processing releases internal stresses that weren’t fully removed by inferior flattening technologies can be costly and time-consuming. The classic example is, of course, a laser in the middle of a cut. When the laser encounters latent stresses in the material, the metal can whip back, sometimes hitting the laser head, which is expensive to repair.

Beyond the simple delivery of flat product, in the case of Olympic, the entire Red Bud line was brought on to replace an existing line at its Minneapolis facility. It provides higher-quality product with add­itional capacity, which will inevitably increase Olympic’s market share.

"The No. 1 feature is the fact that we’ve been able to hit the ground running with a really flat product," says Mallory. "We opened up capacity on our temper mill in Iowa. Ultimately, we have the best of both worlds at Olympic Steel with these processes." MM

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