HMS 1 & 2 80/20 Is Down

It's been a long time since I checked the daily scrap prices in the Wall Street Journal. New billet steel was directly tied to the price of scrap and before going to the mills to negotiate a deal for tonnage, you better know what the price of scrap was fetching.



It is almost like the routine of," on the way to the doctor, I discovered --"  scrap was scrap and it pretty much looked like the image that I took several months back of a loaded gondola car full of HMS 1 &2. That's steel talk for pieces of scrap steel of a certain thickness and length.The HMS is Heavy Melting Scrap for electric arc furnaces that makes most of our new steel today. Yes, scarpers have been recycling since our Jewish ancestors hand pushed a cart down alleys picking up old pieces of steel that no one else wanted. I don't know a scrappy today that isn't a millionaire. Let me rephrase that. I don't know a scrappy today that isn't a millionaire several times over.  There, that's more close to the ones that I do know.

At any rate, The Iron and Steel Institute  melt down all the statistics. Steel is one of those rare commodities that actually has a birth certificate. It is an ASTM-number and a heat number that follows that steel until it is in finished product  (American Society of Testing and Materials). That ASTM certificate tells every thing you want to know about that steel. The lab in a steel mill is fascinating. It's like your grandmother making cookies; add a little of this, a little of that; taste, stir a little more and presto, it's just right.

 It's one of those things that you will never use unless a situation like the I-35 bridge in Minnesota falls again and you can bet the contractors, architects, DOT guys all were looking for those ASTM certificates on that bridge moments of learning about it falling!

Airplane tail numbers and vehicle Vin numbers are the other two. Oh, for you old sailors, yes, your ships got a keel number, but the registration was kept under flags of a country. Sorry. Nice argument made.

When I think about the old days when I walked tours on mill floors, it isn't far back in the memory for  those that lost their lives from accidents. You never wanted to be on the mill floor when a mill cobbled. The sound of a cobble is instantly recognizable. Cobble, especially in a structural mill, is when a billet is coming down the rolling line orange hot at speeds to match freeway traffic; the billet hits one of the rolling stands and instead of the orange hot billet taking the shape of the stand dye,  it shoots up through the rafters and into the roof of the mill. Hopefully, without taking  an impaled  employee with it. Gory? Yes. Industrial accidents are not a pretty thing and thank goodness, we have OSHA, even with all the regulations and paperwork and fines and every nightmarish aspect of an inspection gone bad,

Several things brought this image to mind. The window washers dangling from the 68th floor of the new World Trade Building; the arrival of the first two pieces of steel fabricated for the Margaret McDermott Bridge; the awesome Union Pacific commercial that shows the UP train coming into downtown Dallas in the commercial.It's all related to commerce, steel and ASTM numbers. Funny how things like that can be classified by your brain in the best filing system in the world. The cable used in the window washing buggy must be of a specific standard for cable, which is wire, which comes from new billets that comes from scrap metal.

It is still an awesome history to think about the Rockefeller oil men, the Andrew Carnegie steel men, the Vanderbilt railroad men, the J.P. Morgan bankers, the Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan and the  Dodge Brothers. These Magnates of Industry were all pretty ruthless but gave back many times over for the good of the American people. While things have moved on forward in industry, there still remains gondola car after gondola car heading to steel mills in the country every day to produce our bars, pipes, structural beams, angles, channels plate and much more.

Business Eats Business Eats Business, Then..........

Marketing has always been my thing since my grandfather showed me how to move a box on the counter of his grocery store with a candy bar in it and then watch how customers responded. I was 5. Since then, I have watched marketing  "experts" with amusement. I have seen trends become fads become must-haves and then tank (e.g. the hula hoop and others). I laugh today to hear people talking about a new trend as if it was only "their generation" word.

The key is to learn about cycles. Every thing is in a cycle.  Cycles run day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year. There are some that run bigger cycles like  11 and 13 and 18 year cycles. While the moon cycles every 30 days, the big picture is that the moon actually cycles on 18 years made of many months of 30 day cycles. Marketing is no different. Fashion cycles over time which triggers marketing cycles. So are the cycles of business as they grow, or as they fail.  I happen to like the business of heavy industry from the standpoint of  how it cycles in mergers and mega-mergers that sometimes at first glance do not make a whole lot of sense. It does, however,  takes on the character of art. I'm always looking for examples of heavy industry. That is why you get so many pictures of planes and trains! But those are refined examples.

Several days ago, a couple of pictures came together that could be viewed as chapters in a book  if I had an interest in writing one. The thought has crossed my mind several times, but my driving interest is in the discovery of threads that make up the woven fabric of the story. Like the one that is about to unfold.

This post will be an example of that. It will be a bit more lengthy than most post.

 Not so many years ago,(early 1966) the space program was under way. Later, the shuttle program used ceramic tiles that were made by a company in Waterville, Ohio named Johns Manville. They are an insulation company with a building material division. Martin Marietta is a defense contractor with a building materials division.  It was the first time that such materials were used on a space craft used for re-entry into the earths atmosphere.

At about the same time, (1946) there was a company in Dallas, Texas that made cement and aggregates for construction. They expanded into the two biggest grow states, Texas and California. Building airports and expressways that just fit as a logical source of revenue.

Florida Steel began operations in 1956. Florida Steel not only supplied the state with construction materials such as reinforcing bars and channels and angle bar, as well as ornamental squares and rounds, it exported a great deal to the islands like the Bahamas and others in the greater and lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Islands.

The Rogers family in Texas is well entrenched. Ralph, a long-time friend of St. Mark's School, his son, Robert, a member of the Federal Reserve Board and Jamie, the COO of Texas Industries (TXI).

Somewhere in there the Rogers co-founded Chaparral Steel in Midlothian, Texas. They also built a large cement plant in Midlothian that most in North Texas are familiar with, but may not realize that it is only one of three plants that TXI now owns

In the mid 1970's integrated steel mills in America were beginning to dismantle themselves. The new fad, the trend was heading toward mini mills.. The easiest way to describe a mini mill is instead of an integrated steel mill rolling all products that made up their complete rolling schedules,  a mini mill will take one or two, sometimes three, like products and roll nothing but those products, An integrated mill might schedule bar products for two weeks during the year, one in the spring and one in the fall. That would include round bars, round wire rod by coil  and reinforcing bar. A mini mill would roll only those three items every week throughout the year. The next major change between an integrated mill and a mini mill is its size. It's a much smaller operation under one roof, where an integrated mill would still be under one roof, that roof may stretch for miles. And the final difference is the number of people working in the mill. An integrated mill would have 50,000 employees. A mini mill might have 400 including office staff.

So what does all this mean? It means that marketing people and others, should be paying more attention to how companies morph into monster industries.  In short, a defense contractor buys an aggregates company that  co-founded a steel company that became part of the melt down of American steel companies as we once knew  as the backbone of this country that has consumed nearly every  established mill  in this country from east coast to west coast, Minnesota to Florida. with headquarters in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

The net results is a company that will own over 400 stone quarries, several distribution yards, mines and plants that includes all but 14 states in the US from the Caribbean Islands to the Arctic Circle. One that makes ballistic missiles, fighter air craft, satellites, Atlas launch vehicles and munitions to name only a few.

While Gerdau, the Brazilian steel maker since 1901, has no connection now with the new Martin Marietta Material, since Chaparral Steel was connected to the Rogers family, it does resemble a propagation of  a business in general that is a world leader. In short, three separate companies cycled into two hugh and separate businesses and the genealogy is all connected.  Who would have thunk!

Rail Cars Being Loaded. Hard to imagine that the new Parent of the parent builds Atlas Launch Vehicles, Radars, Munitions to name a few.

Rail Cars Waiting to be Switched Out of the TXI Aggregates

An engine sits ready to move cars onto a siding that will make up a train. Above, a Southwest flight with landing gear already down, is on a final to Love Field.

edited for correction of omitted text.
edited to clarify  the association of Johns Manville and Martin Marietta. I have visited the JM plant over the years and have seen some of the changes they have been forced to endure. I hold no interest to burden them in any way in this article. JM is now owned by Berkshire Hathaway,