TPT September 2013

Tube mi l ls and rol l forming

Tube mills and roll forming

Photo: Myung Jin Machinery Co Ltd – South Korea

In the origin stories that highly successful manufacturers are proud to feature on their websites, the early material seldom varies. The visionary founder, the one-room operation, the dedicated few workers: then, after many years of trial-and-error, the seemingly sudden breakthrough of which industrial legends are made. For many tube makers, roll forming provided that moment. One old-line company, whose early history of patient striving fits into a paragraph or two, installed its first rolling mill in the 1880s. Self-sufficient in skelp overnight, very quickly it built blast furnaces to make its own raw iron.

Before long, ten lap welding furnaces and seven butt welding furnaces were being kept busy.

“Tubes in great variety thus came from a highly automated factory,” reports the company historian; and, between 1891 and 1901, three waves of corporate mergers “washed over” it. For the firms whose products and services are reviewed in the following pages, this will come as no surprise.