The Timken Company will increase its annual steelmaking capacity by 120,000t across its steel manufacturing facilities in Canton, Ohio. The company is achieving this boost through a series of improvements at its Harrison Steel Plant that build upon and further leverage the $60m rolling-mill investment completed there in 2008.
Over the last two years, continuous improvement efforts at the Harrison plant allowed the company to achieve record output well beyond the new mill’s original design. Additional investments and crew additions being made over the next few months will enable a further increase in output and will allow the company to optimize production loads between its Harrison and Faircrest plants. The changes will effectively create new capacity at both of these steel facilities to support growing demand for finished bar products and billets for tubing product which serve customers in the global industrial; oil and gas; and mobile markets.
“We are expanding our capacity to better serve customers who need high-performance steel,” said Sal Miraglia, president of Timken’s steel business. “We understand that it takes a nimble company to ramp up for economic recovery and also adjust production to serve our customers’ most critical, demanding application requirements. These changes will give us greater flexibility in our processes, support our efforts to improve delivery performance, and provide much-needed capacity to serve growing sectors of the global marketplace.”
Miraglia said the plant will reach the full volume planned within six to 12 months, depending on testing, product mix, specifications and other customer requirements.
Competitive investments in Timken steel operations
“We are investing additional resources to increase throughput and improve customer service in very constrained market conditions,” said Miraglia, who noted that this latest round of improvements to increase capacity follows a series of more than $200m in advanced technology investments the company has made at its Canton, Ohio-based steel operations since 2006.
In February, Timken announced it would invest $35m to install a high-volume, in-line forge press at its Faircrest rolling mill that will be one of a kind in the US. Last year, the company announced $50m in capital improvements to its Harrison and Gambrinus steel plants.
Previous investments include two new heat-treat lines and a scrap logistics system added between 2006 and 2007; the acquisition and expansion of Boring Specialties and the addition of a long-length tube line in 2008; as well as a small bar mill commissioned at the Harrison facility later that year in collaboration with Daido Steel.