By comparison to the 1990s, recent years have seen a slowing of capital improvements for North America's electric melt shops. That hiatus in investment apparently is over. Leading the charge is Charter Steel. The Wisconsin mini-mill is installing a new melt shop outside Cleveland to feed its bar mill there. Another new melt shop will anchor SeverCorr's greenfield steel mill in Columbus, MS. Republic Engineered Steels restarted its revamped melt shop in Canton, OH; Gerdau Ameristeel has ordered an upgrade for its melting facilities in Jacksonville, FL; and Sidertul is upgrading its melt shop at Independencia, in Tultitlan, Mexico. In a 90-million dollars project, Danieli (www.danieli.com) has supplied Charter Steel with a 75-ton electric arc furnace, a ladle met furnace, a single-tank vacuum degasser, and a four-strand, 9-m-radius continuous caster. The new melting and casting operation will support Charter Steel's rod and bar-in-coil rolling mill in Cuyahoga Heights, which it acquired in 2002. "Our new steelmaking facility will allow Charter Steel to expand its current capability to produce the increasingly cleaner steels with minimal internal segregation and excellent surface characteristics that our customers require for their most demanding applications," proclaimed John Mellowes, chairman and CEO of Charter Manufacturing Co., at the start of the project of 2004.
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