The tallest building in Stark County is a one

CANTON, Ohio -- The tallest building in Stark County is a square, gray, windowless warehouse in the middle of TimkenSteel's Faircrest Plant that contains a one-of-a-kind apparatus.

Starting near the top of the 200-foot structure, strands of molten metal, glowing bright hot shades of red and orange, drop 270 feet from a ladle into a basement. Along the way they are cooled and squeezed into some of the highest quality, most expensive steel anywhere in the world in bars up to 18 by 24 inches in size -- more than 50 percent larger than other casters.

The 20-story jumbo bloom vertical caster, which cost $200 million, represents the company's latest bid to secure an advantage in a stifling U.S. steel market.

It has been a shaky first year for the steel company, which spun off from parent Timken Co. last June, as raw materials costs have met declining demand for specialized steel used to drill oil and gas wells thousands of feet below the earth's surface.

But TimkenSteel is proud of its new caster, and confident that its unique capability will keep the company ahead of its competition. In the company's first quarterly financial report this year, CEO Ward Timken, Jr. touted the company's unique capabilities in the face of falling earnings.

TimkenSteel spent $200 million for a high-tech advantage

On a tour of the factory Wednesday, spokesman Joe Milicia was guarded about photographs inside the new space, which he said was full of proprietary technology.

This is not your grandfather's steel mill. Outside the plant there is barely a trace of dust. There are no smoking stacks, or blazing flares. Birds fly in and out of the open recesses of the superstructure and, next door, corn grows in rows of deep green.

Inside, nine months after the first steel was poured into the top of the towering contraption in November, big blooms of steel were flowing seamlessly through a series of rollers and clamps, each one specifically engineered to hold the steel in place and keep it at the right pressure and temperature to cool into flawless bars.

A team of eight employees needn't do much more than watch the glowing rods slowly descend. A man wearing a reflective heat suit pulled up a 300-ton ladle crane from the floor of the warehouse building to the top of the caster, over 100 feet up, with the delicate flick of a joystick.

In an increasingly tight steel industry, where input costs for raw materials have crept up and foreign competition has increased production capacity, TimkenSteel is moving in its own direction.

"At this plant we are at the high end of the SBQ niche," Plant Director Nick Valentine said Wednesday. SBQ stands for special bar quality, a category of steel that can withstand abnormal heats and pressures in applications like deep-well oil and gas drilling, sports car engines and jet airplane components.

"If you're watching any auto race, our steel is in the crankshaft," Valentine said.

Clean steel is well cared for

Besides the fact that it is the largest of its kind in the world, TimkenSteel's Faircrest caster is unique in that it is entirely vertical, meaning that the steel doesn't bend out at the bottom.

Instead the steel drops straight down in vertical columns and is cut off by a torch, picked up by a mechanical arm and then carried off to cooling chambers on specially designed robotic trucks.

"The vertical casting process avoids bending and unbending," Valentine said. "This whole process is designed to protect the cleanliness of the steel. If you want to make high-quality steel, you have to protect it."

Even the space between the giant ladle of molten metal and the top of the caster is accounted for. Nitrogen gas is circulated in a barrier around the spout, preventing any oxidation that might occur if the steel came in contact with open air.

In addition to improved quality, the new caster has also increased the output at the plant, which has delivered over 1 million tons of steel per year since it opened in 1985.

The new caster is capable of running non-stop. Even as the two giant ladles rotate, steel continues to flow out of a dish called a tundish, where steel is funneled into the caster at very precise rates and pressures.

At the end of a good eight-hour shift, as many as 150 blooms of special bar steel -- long, still glowing bars -- exit the bottom of the tower, each weighing between five and 10 tons a piece.

From there the steel is reheated, shaped into different sized bars, and shipped off to customers who can choose between over 400 different grades of steel.

"Hopefully now you get a sense of why we made this investment," Milicia said. "We can make steel here unlike anywhere else in the country."

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Faircrest Steel Plant has produced 1 million tons of steel since it opened in 1984. The mill has produced roughly 1 million tons per year since opening in 1985.

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