Ed's Travelogue: Last Day, Babcock and Wilcox (B&W) Tubular Products Division, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 17 July 1978

Do you remember the old Eddy Arnold song, "Welcome To My World"? Wellll, this is not quite a Travelogue type of post but a Welcome To My World kind of post. At least the world as I knew it over 40 years ago. It's a long story but at one time I was working six days here at the mill, two-to-three part-time days at the Towne Theater, and carrying a full load of classes at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee campus. I was beat! I dropped out of college to earn a living and ended staying here at B&W until joing the Air Force. Starting out as a summer job taking maintenance calls in the machine shop, then progressing to a laborer in the mill for my next summer, and finally hiring on full-time in the steel yard. It was in retrospect a fascinating job, one I actually enjoyed but there were a couple of significant downsides that I'll talk about later. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Here at B&W we made seamless steel tubing and the process was quite interesting:

Bars of steel come in by railroad and get stacked into piles out in 'the yard'

The Material Selector gets his sheet at the beginning of the shift and goes outside to look for that days steel on the cutting schedule (at the end of each bar is stamped a 'heat number' and that's what the Material Selector is looking for) 

The Material Selector tells the overhead crane operator which bars need to be pulled and sometimes that entails breaking down an entire pile to get to the bars needed

Depending on the type of steel the bars get stacked on short inclined rollways to be fed into one of several different cutting apparatus: torch, shears, carbide saw

The short pieces cut from the bars are called 'billets' and these are fed by conveyor into 'U' racks whereupon they get picked up by a R/C overhead crane and taken to one of two rollway's in the plant, after which they are fed into either one of two furnaces. The inside overhead cranes were operated via a big, old school type of R/C control - a big box that hung by a leather belt worn by the Outlet Operator

The Outlet Operator brings the crane over to the 'U' racks, hooks up the load then picks it up and places it on the rollway

Some steel is so hard it requires an extra step prior to going on the rollway. It must have a small hole drilled or torched into the end to enable the piercer to strike dead center and not sheer off center and ruin the piercer. Holes were either drilled by a slow moving drill, or they were blown into the end using a horizontally mounted torch

The mill had two furnaces. The East Mill had a real small rollway just in front of the furnace doors. The West Mill had to be fed via conveyor from the large rollway

The billets get fed into the furnace which could be anywhere from about 1200°F-1800°F-ish degrees. When they came out they were a beautiful bright red

The next step turned solid billets into tubes: immediately after coming out of the furnace they were pierced by what looked like a very long rod with a cannon shell at the end. This was fascinating to watch because as the piercer was being ramrodded into the end of the billet it did two things: it created a tube and lengthened it somewhat - due to the act of displacing the metal as the piercer rammed through. At the same time this was going on a beautiful emerald green trail of flame would be ejected from the rear of the tube - cool!

Next stop, 'the mill'. The now tubes (albeit short ones) go into the mill where they pass through a series of umm - mills. Confusing? There were a series of rollers called 'mills' going down a perhaps sixty foot (???) path. Inside each mill was a set of rollers, and in each 'mill' the rollers formed an incrementally smaller diameter such that when the larger billet cum tube passed through the first mill to the time it came out the last 'mill' it would be substantially reduced in diameter. Thus a billet which started out as, let's say 140", would end up becoming a 40' tube!

The tubes aren't finished yet though. After being formed they're quite crooked and need to go the 'starightener' where they are pushed through the machine under high pressure. Imagine taking a short length of bent wire and pulling it through your fingers to straighten it out - same principle, just on a larger scale

After straightening the tubes get cut to the customer's specifications and get sent out via truck or railway

I was at B&W about six years and in all that time this was the only newsletter we got!

The Steel Yard, my home away from home

The short table you see under the crane is like a mini-rollway where bars are loaded for the days cutting

The day before Thanksgiving 1977 was not a good one for me. I was operating the torch that day (located in the small building seen just beyond the the rollway table) and needed to roll down the next bar onto the conveyor. The bars are kept from rolling by small wedges of wood and sometimes the bars were already crooked as they came from the foundry. One of those crooked bars got kind of stuck behind the wooden wedge and when I dislodged the wedge the bar suddenly snapped, rolled, and trapped my right arm underneath!! OUCH! It all happened in a blink of an eye. Fortunately there were a couple of co-workers nearby and they pried the bar up enough such that I could free my arm. A trip to the hosppital didn't reveal any broken bones but DAMN did my arm hurt!!

That bar weighed 1800lbs BTW

The next day - Thursday - was Thanksgiving and we had the day off

Friday I was back at work!

The 'U' racks. Billets would come down the conveyor and we would roll them into these rack. Sometimes they fell out and we would need to get the crane to get them back into the racks. Smaller billets could be hefted back in place by hand! From here the steel would be taken by crane to the rollway

To the left, the cut-off saw. To the right was a machine called 'the shears' - essentially a big guillotine for cutting steel bars - and good grief was it LOUD

The large rollway leading to the West Mill. To the left is the metal covers over the conveyor

What made me finally call it quits? Well, that incident in November 1977 didn't help, but then the winter of 1977-78 was the coldest in Milwaukee history. It was even covered on a History Channel episode about weather. How cold was it? Well, for about 44 (45?) days the temperature in Milwaukee never got above -15°F and with the wind chill factor we often had temps down to -65°!!! And remember, Milwaukee is on the shore of Lake Michigan so we had a lot of windy days. I was still working night shift at that time so felt the coldest of the cold during that period.

So, by joining the military did I make a good career choice? Well, I stayed with it until retiring 24 years later. And whatever happened to B&W? It was a big, global, energy product related concern but that didn't help much when they went bankrupt sometime during the 1980s in one of the big recessions back then. The Tubular Products Division in Milwaukee ended up being torn down and a trucking terminal built in its place!