I'm a big fan of 26C3 which is made by uddeholmstrip for Voelstalpine

insanely clean stuff. Very high hardness and it sharpens super easily.

Yeah, but people don't care...as long as they get stuff cheaper

Username has never been more appropriate

The Nucor mill near us is a true mini mill. I don't think they roll any structural shapes larger than a W6x15 and only up to 6" angle and the larger sizes you get above 3x3" angle they have a schedule of when it's rolled. From the last list I saw a lot of it was misc. stuff. 1-1/2" and 2-1/2" angle and stuff. We never use any of that stuff except a lot of w6x15's and 3x3x3/8 angle for clips and some 6x4 angle for circular platforms. No idea who uses the 1-1/2" misc. sized angles but I think that type of stuff is the majority of stuff they roll.

Used to do work for a company outside of Houston that made grating. They bought steel coils by the trainload and have several waiting to unloaded on their spur all the time. They had a machine they had made that uncoiled and burned the plate into what would normally be long ass flat bar, turn it up, notch it, for making grating by the truckload. They went out of business but their super giant competitor was 45 minutes away.

Is the low production self inflicted by environmental regulation?

Here’s a big titanium 6-4 ingot that is about to be rolled down to slab to make some armor plates.  Weight about 40,000#

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Here’s some hot rolling in action.  Don’t recall what’s being rolled in this photo.  Could be some carbon steel. Heading out of the Roughing mill and heading into the finishing mill train.

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Rolling down an ingot.  Maybe it’s Ti don’t remember
Flash is just water spray from hydraulic descaling - about 3200 psi water pressure
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A nice Ti-6-4 plate I annealed and leveled during a lockout a few years ago.   Was a lot of fun finally getting to actually operate the equipment myself.  Was pretty good at it

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I have a friend who married a girl from China.  He told me a story about the government going door to door where her family is from confiscating all the steel cookware to make their steel quotas.

I have heard a lot of people say that if you are an American company in China, you MUST hire an American to oversee Chinese production, otherwise it won't work.

Bayou steel was in real bad shape. They had to lift part of the building up when they replaced the electric arc furnace. They rolled just for themselves some 13" plate to set the columns on that had sunk. Crazy shit. I never work with that kind of stuff but really surprised the plate burner using an oxy torch just cut it up lickity split.

Not really supply side stuff. Talked to a guy that worked at a plate fab shop in Anacortes, WA. They do penstock stuff for hydro power stuff. They ordered some 5" plate and then they wanted it rolled. That's not an everyday thing. They found a company in Houston so they shipped the plate and they went to Houston to layout how he wanted it broke. I knew it was going to very very hard to find someone to roll it and would instead brake it little by little. Spent all morning scribing the brake points (Like I'm pretty sure any place that can do that had someone that would do it in no time). All morning. First brake the scale shatted and all his marks disappaeared. I love it when a plan comes together. He deserved it.

Communism always fails.

If you agree with me, then you understand that the chart is irrelevant because it's only a matter of time until it crashes.

Focus on fixing our country if you want to save our country.  That includes unleashing the shackles placed on every American business.

Case in point... I'm a one person manufacturing business.  I do some cool shit.  To do taxes properly, it takes my wife about 4 weeks straight of book keeping and shit like that to get just the federal/state taxes done.  We also have our only 2 kids with dire health conditions.  The other day she said to me "I've been trying to finish taxes but I keep getting distracted by medical stuff for the kids."

Let that statement sink in.

We are FUCKING ourselves raw with our shitty policies.  The tax system is one such shitty policy.  I didn't include the 1 month of inventory I would have to do every year if I followed my local county's property tax system.  According to them, I should inventory the dog's bed at the shop and apply a value to it and be taxed on it accordingly.

Talking about charts with China's steel production is USELESS until we fix the communist-lite policies that are ruining our productivity.

it appears Nigel's future is in Chinese steel.

Bohler makes very nice steel, their powdered steels are ultra clean

Things could be so much worse though. Trump could be saying mean things on Twatter.

Decatur AL.  All the heavy industry in Decatur is south of the Tenn River (except the Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power plant, 2nd largest in the US); there is no big lake in Decatur AL.  Having said that, the Tenn River in that area could look very much like a lake; especially if you're not from that area.

According to GE, the three Nucor plants are just north and NW of the ULA rocket plant.  The ULA rocket plant is located at  34.62896   -87.075392.  The three Nucor plants are to the north and NW within a couple miles or so.

According to the sickening and sad charge, we never did.

About 17 years ago my Cousin did a three year stint as a QC guy at their manufacturing line in rural china. If you didn't babysit the line 24/7 the quality would go to shit and the assholes would hide the shitty parts in the bottoms of boxes.

When my Cousin moved up and got to a position of influence he helped moved most of the production back to the USA.

Eventually the one child policy is going to make labor costs rise and it'll force companies to rethink production. The downside is shit like this doesn't happen overnight...

It didn't happen overnight, it happened over the last 20 years.

Chinese labor costs are higher than labor costs in other places like Vietnam or Mexico.

Which is why all that shit has been moving back to North America for years.

This.
Carpenter has a plant just across the river in Tanner. They do some mill work.

Is that the former GM/Saginaw plant?  We used to pass it all the time on the way to Swan Creek WMA Range back in the day.