STEEL ON THE ROUGE

[Music] [Applause] [Music] is the Rouge the name of a river and the name of a place that's what the early French explorers called it after the local Indian name meaning Red River today the road affords passage to some of the great or boats of the world [Music] [Music] the huge vessels move in from the Great Lakes past Detroit and push on the nearby Dearborn [Music] this is the place and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else on earth Ford Motor Company's Rouge plant an industrial city that takes in iron ore and other raw materials at one hand and yields finished automobiles at the other our film concerns the first giant step in that process making steel [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the steal story begins on the great Mesabi Range in Minnesota world war two exhausted much of the Mesabi is once vast supply of high-grade iron ore but today the new and extremely efficient process utilizes the great quantities of low-grade ore that remain they are called taconite he is ground to a fine powder and then powerful magnets draw out the particles rich in iron mixed with a blending agent the particles are formed into hard pellets of precisely controlled content producing more of a higher grade than any raw or the Mesabi ever yielded in hopper cars the pellets travel across Minnesota to the port of Duluth on the Great Lakes where Ford ships are waiting then on to the Rouge at dockside the pellets are unloaded in 17-ton bites and carried off to storage bins now one of our basic ingredients is on hand another is coke formed from coal in huge coke ovens coke is almost pure carbon and on leaving the upper mid ignites with oxygen in the air the ignition is short-lived however for a quenching power lies just down the track [Music] to take nearly ten thousand gallons of water to cool a carload and the result is a beautiful cumulus cloud of steam then come the blast furnaces three of them at the roof in stories high for the first requirement of high quality steel is pure iron which the great furnaces provide elevator cars called skips carry iron ore coke and limestone to the top of the furnace the coke will provide fuel for the furnace to melt the iron and also will carry off oxygen from the ore limestone is added because it will combine with other impurities in the iron forming a slag as temperatures in the furnace reached 3,000 degrees the molten iron settles to the bottom with the flag floating on top of it moving in a suspended drill bites into a plug near the bottom of the furnace as the opening has made molten iron pours out into a slag skimmer pit sending a shower of sparks in all directions slag is in from the surface of the molten iron and flows through a sand line trough in the floor the slide will be used to manufacture bricks cinder blocks and paving materials other troughs on the floor carry the molten iron and its progress is carefully watched all along the way this infernal like scene has repeated many times a day for each of the great blast furnaces is tapped every four hours samples are taken for laboratory analysis part of an overall quality control program designed to provide dependability for over 15,000 parts in every automobile the river of iron runs out into torpedo-shaped railroad cars they are actually rolling thermos bottles with a thick lining of ceramic brick to keep the iron molten some of the iron will be used in the foundry or engine blocks and other parts but most of it is earmarked for steel along with train loads of scrap that move into the Rouge daily there are two great oxygen furnaces each producing as much steel in 3 hours as an old open hearth furnace coach in a full day production begins as 95 tons of scrap metal pours into the open mouth of the furnace [Applause] then the vessel is righted meanwhile a torpedo car bottle has been rotated on its axis to for a hundred and ninety tons of molten iron into a mammoth ladle and the ladle is carried off to the furnace [Music] and now comes the time to really fire up from high overhead a water-cooled pipe disome slowly toward the open mouth of the vessel pure oxygen forces through the pipe 20,000 cubic feet of it in a minute causing the molten mates to roar and churn and raising its temperature to 3,500 degrees the oxygen combines with carbon and other elements in the iron and the whole exhaust of the vessel passes through a multimillion-dollar electrostatic precipitator that removes dust from the furnace gases as carbon and other impurities are removed from the iron it gradually becomes steel for steel is basically a highly refined iron behind a shield workers move in as the flaming cauldron dips slowly toward them a port in the shield provides access to the blinding glare of the furnace through it a sample is withdrawn the exact chemical composition is critical now samples are quickly dispatched to a laboratory where in two minutes a vacuum spectrometer analyzes the elements present with extreme accuracy [Music] temperature is critical to and a measuring device is plunged directly into the molten steel once the temperature is recorded the instrument a thermocouple is expendable the readings are right the metal is ready 250 tons of molten steel pour out of the furnace produced in less than one hour it is enough for 400 automobile in the control room called the melters pulpit the whole operation is carefully monitored at this stage precise amounts of other elements may be added to the molten metal to give the exact alloy of Steel desire [Applause] then the ladle moves to the teaming area named after an old English word that means pouring [Music] from a nozzle in the bottom of the ladle molten steel pours into ingot moulds which hold up to 16 tons of the metal steel workers carefully guide the giant ladle along down the row of waiting molds [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the ingots are allowed to cool in the molds long enough for a solid shell of steel to form around the still molten Center [Music] after the moles are removed the ingots still extremely hot are lowered into a gas-fired so compare [Music] here after soaking up heat for several hours they will be quite hot again at a uniform temperature of about 2400 degrees inside and out just right for Roland lifted from the soaking bit a 16-ton ingot heads for the first big rolling mill guided by remote control being it moves back and forth between the big rolls it grows flatter and longer and occasionally is flipped like a pancake to ensure uniform rolling big as this mill is it takes a fine touch to juggle a hot ingot deftly particularly when two operators must coordinate their movements it takes a good man two full years to learn this job and three before he's an expert as these after about 20 passes the steel slab now about five inches thick and 35 feet long moves on toward the scarfing machine [Music] here intensely hot Jets of natural gas and oxygen burn off the outer layer of the slab removing surface imperfections with two million pounds of thrust behind the blade steel can be cut like bacon providing 16 foot lengths that are then reheated for the next milk a hot strip mill stretching more than a thousand feet from furnaces to Kyler's now takes over here the 16-foot slab passes through a series of roll growing longer and thinner as it moves along ayuh pressure Jets of water removes surface scale and repair the steel for the next stage the roles of the finishing sands here the temperature and thickness of the strip are controlled to extremely precise tolerances emerging at the end of the mill the threat is cooled and then it is coiled the result something that finally begins to look like sheet steel the original 16-foot slab is now over 600 feet long and about 1/10 of an inch thick the whole process from slab to coil took less than two minutes joined together and cleaned the coils are now ready for cold rolling to the required gauge for automobile bodies and panels to provide precision results monitoring and control equipment automatically adjusts roll openings speed and tension in one of the most modern high speed tandem Mills in industry after annealing and temper rolling the final product is a 5-foot wide coil of steel nearly a mile long enough for the body panels hood coverings and wheel housings of a hundred automobiles some is used for cars produced at the Rouge but most is shipped to other Ford plants around the country as coils of sheet steel or stamped and fabricated parts [Music] [Applause] steel on the Rouge each coil of it reflected in every train load of a hundred cars that makes its way slowly out along the riverbanks formed and forged rolled and drawn checked and monitored all along the way [Music] this attention to precision and detail by the engineers and the steel workers the production people and the quality control people has a dramatic payoff in dependable and safe transportation on the highway [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] 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