Operator talent: The heart of the plate and angle rolling business

Figure 1
Four U.S. plate and angle roll company managers attended Davi’s Master Benders Tech event earlier this year. From left: Ed Libby, president, Oakley Steel Products Co.; Al Sanders, sales and estimating manager, Max Weiss Co. LLC; Lynton Holloway, president, Holloway Company Inc.; and Kenneth Moscrip, president, Paramount Roll & Forming Inc.

In the sheet metal arena, the relationship between operator and machine has changed dramatically. Whether they’re in front of a laser, punch press, or press brake, operators today can call up a program, set up the tools and materials, run a tryout part for the initial setup, and the CNC takes care of the rest. Once setup is complete, the machine (at least ideally) is good to go.

Not so with rolling. Walk into an angle and plate rolling shop and you discover how meticulous the job is. The rolling operator and his helper prebend, then feed the plate into the rolls ever so carefully, adjusting roll pressure here, shimming for extra crowning there. Material thickness and hardness can vary from plate to plate, which calls for more adjustment. In a custom rolling operation, variables change so often from one piece to the next that many machines still are under manual control.

What makes or breaks a rolling operation really is the relationship between the operator, his machine, and the job at hand. It’s a relationship unique in metal manufacturing, and in the rolling business it hasn’t changed for years. Problem is, just about everything else has.

Earlier this year four veterans of the U.S. angle and plate rolling business drove this point home when they participated at a roundtable discussion at Master Benders Tech event held in Cesena, Italy, at Davi headquarters (see Figure 1). The plate and angle roll manufacturer is also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. More than 60 people from 40 top rolling shops around the world attended the April event.

Rolling Evolution

These U.S. rolling veterans had stories to tell. Second-generation owner Lynton Holloway, president of Holloway Company Inc., Saginaw, Texas, purchased the business from his father, Gene Holloway, in 2007. Gene started in 1971 in the crane rental business, and a few years later delved into plate rolling of ground storage water tanks. In the ensuing years Holloway expanded into pressure vessels and, in the 1990s, structural angle roll work.

The company shifted gears into custom plate rolling around 2000. And shortly after Lynton took over from his father in 2007, he purchased a nearby roll shop to increase capacity. He has come a long way from pushing brooms on the shop floor.

Ed Libby also has come a long way since taking the helm of Oakley Steel Products Co., a Bellwood, Ill., company that has survived not only the Great Recession of 2009 and 2010 but also the Great Depression of the 1930s. Libby’s great-grandfather launched the company in 1921.

In 2000 Libby took over as president, and big changes ensued. “Our company was known as a local shop that services the steel mills—rolling and forming plates used for steel mill repair work,” he said. “When I came in, I tried to market our company on a national level. We built another facility, we invested in new equipment, and our combined capabilities allowed us to do bigger projects in different areas of the country. We enjoyed great success for a seven-year run. And then of course the markets fell, and as fast as we grew, we also declined.”

Since the recession Oakley has endured two floods, each leaving about 20 inches of standing water in the facility—not good for rolling equipment. So after the flood, the company initiated a relationship with Davi and started buying plate rolls.

In recent years Oakley has been rebuilding. As Libby put it, managers no longer just “step on the gas” to grow the business. They now focus on careful, manageable growth. It boils down to offering diverse services to a diverse customer base.

Figure 2
This 3-D bender rotates the pipe as it is being pushed through the rollers. This gives the machine the ability to bend round pipe in any direction. The system also can bend rectangular tube and structural sections.

Kenneth Moscrip knows all about diverse services. His grandfather—who launched Santa Fe Springs, Calif.-based Paramount Roll & Forming in 1963—probably couldn’t have imagined the kind of work the shop has accomplished in recent years. Certain artistic projects have called for some seriously complex forming. Paramount also offers induction bending, a niche process that, thanks to induction heat, can bend pipe and structural radii like no other forming process can.

Al Sanders is sales and estimating manager for Milwaukee-based Max Weiss Co., a 70-year-old rolling shop and fabricator with roots in blacksmithing. Sanders isn’t part of the Weiss family, but instead came to the roll business out of vocational high school. He started as a helper, moved up to machine operator and then supervisor before transitioning to his current role in sales and estimating.

“Since the recession, I think we’ve all learned that diversification is the name of the game,” he said. “We’ll bend components for ships, for nonresidential constructions, for OEMs. It could be aluminum extrusions or stainless steel. And we’re offering more drilling, cutting, and certified welding.”

What Has Changed

All four roundtable participants agreed: A lot has changed since they started in this business. For one thing, more plate and angle rolling operations have opened their doors, which in turn has tightened competition. Margins are lower and lead times are shorter.

“Making a good buck on a rolled part nowadays is difficult,” Libby said, adding that recently he looked at one job involving wide-flange beam rolled to a 50-ft. radius. The price for that job had actually decreased by 60 percent.

Roll shops have branched out to grow. For decades Max Weiss has offered various fabrication services. It has delved into proprietary incremental bending processes, in which a workpiece is pushed along stationary, nonrotating tools that bend the workpiece incrementally, giving a little push at a time.

Oakley also is offering more fabrication (such as cutting and drilling) than it once did, but it approaches the market strategically. “We offer it, but we have to be careful about fabrication work, because some of our customers are fabricators as well,” Libby said. “We don’t actively chase it.”

In 2007 Holloway had the opportunity to buy a nearby roll shop, and he was happy to make the investment. Overtime was mounting as his operators tried to keep up with demand, and the purchase gave his company six new angle rolls.

“We really needed to increase capacity, and it reduced our overtime significantly,” he said. “In the current economy, I wouldn’t necessarily buy another shop. I’d need to make sure the company [I purchased] had a client list with enough work to pay for the acquisition. There are just more rollers and more shops out there than there used to be, so competition is tough.”

Paramount Roll’s history is full of strategic moves to new technology and less crowded markets. Once upon a time it was considered one of the premier cone rolling operations on the West Coast. Before long, though, more shops in the area started rolling cones, which pushed down prices. So the company transitioned to structural profile rolling.

Figure 3
This control, used in conjunction with other systems, provides the operator with feedback during the angle rolling process.

“The structural rolling saved us,” Moscrip recalled. “For the longest time, our shop was the only place that could bend beams the hard way [along the strong axis].” Again, more players moved into the market, and structural rolling prices plummeted.

Then about five years ago, Paramount expanded into induction bending, a challenging process that’s still not very common, even though it’s been around since the late 1960s. According to John Gillanders’ Pipe and Tube Bending Manual, published by the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, the first induction benders started appearing in the U.S. in the early 1970s.

As Gillanders writes, “When everything is aligned with the pipe properly secured in its clamps, electric power is transmitted to an inductor ring, which circumscribes the pipe at the tangent point. This causes the pipe to heat up in a narrow band immediately beneath the ring.” The heat is controlled to some extent by water quenching, and this controlled heat makes the metal sufficiently ductile for bending.

It’s a complex process that not only requires large capital investment, but also a skilled technician to manage it. And access to skilled people, of course, remains the greatest barrier to entry for the rolling business.

“I think we as shop owners sometimes make it look like anybody can do this,” Holloway said. “Some companies figure, ‘Hey, we’re paying a roll shop $100,000 a year to roll my stuff. But I can buy a $250,000 machine and hire someone to roll.’ But it’s not that simple. Without quality people, our business simply couldn’t exist.”

What Hasn’t Changed: People

The rolling business bucks the stereotype of manufacturing automation, with a bank of machines being managed by one or a handful of operators. Rolling needs operators engaged every step of the way.

“We have sleepless nights over employees,” said Moscrip. “We can’t live without employees, of course, and we can’t have just one person running all the equipment.

“We spend so much time training people,” he continued. “It takes years to get these guys to a point where you feel they can run the machines by themselves. At our company, you need to be a helper working with a qualified operator for about two years, on average. I have some guys who take the full two years to get up to speed. For some guys, it takes just a few months. And the people who really learn the machine are the ones you really need to keep. They’re extraordinarily difficult to find.”

Sanders added that Max Weiss participates in a state-sponsored apprenticeship program. It takes about four years, if apprentices want to learn a variety of processes. And among those processes, rolling stands apart. “You can’t just punch in ‘12 in. radius’ and have the workpiece come out perfectly. It’s not like stamping.”

Moscrip concurred. “The human factor is always going to be involved in this business.”

A New Approach to the CNC

The human factor perhaps is what made Davi’s event earlier this year unconventional in metal manufacturing. Much of the new technology in this business aims to mitigate the need for the skilled operator.

Things are different in the custom plate and angle rolling arena, a difference made especially apparent at the event when a technician demonstrated a new horizontal angle roll. During the machine cycle, the workholding clamp not only pushes the pipe but also rotates it. This allows the system to perform 3-D bending, forming round tube or pipe in all directions.

During a demonstration at the event, the 3-D bending machine simultaneously fed and rotated a round pipe through the three horizontal rolls. The pipe snaked out of the machine in a freeform shape with multiple radii and various directions of bend—a shape that would have been arduous to make on a conventional angle roll (see Figure 2).

One would think that such an advanced machine has a conventional CNC, but this is profile bending. The system does have a CNC, but it’s not conventional (see Figure 3).

“Let’s face it, when you talk about CNC, and you speak with a professional profile bender, they’ll all say, ‘I’ll never use it.’ And that’s true. He does not need a CNC.”

So said Arjen Alderliefste. An expert representative on Davi’s technical support team, Alderliefste added there’s a reason that CNC hasn’t gained a big foothold in the industry. Outside certain production rolling operations, plate and angle rolling simply has too much variability. Plate thickness and hardness can change from batch to batch. Each plate is within the range promised by the mill, but it’s still a range, and that range is what makes rolling so unpredictable. That’s why having the right operator, who measures the angle and makes adjustments along the way, is so critical.

As Alderliefste explained, product developers at Davi knew this fact, and then asked a logical question: If skilled operators will always be critical in the rolling industry, could a CNC be made to emulate what an operator does?

From this came the CNC introduced at the Master Benders Tech event. The control will be used in conjunction with other systems able to provide feedback to the angle roll machine. When an operator starts the operation, the CNC shows the settings he needs to roll the workpiece to the final shape. The operator won’t use those settings at first, lest he overbend the part. Instead, he underbends the first pass and will check the actual radius with the feedback system in place. Think of it as a kind of electronic template.

For the second pass, the control gives another list of settings that theoretically would form the workpiece to the final shape. The operator again doesn’t use these settings but instead underbends.

“He will not use the [suggested settings] until the workpiece is nearly there,” Alderliefste said.

Once the workpiece is almost done, the operator then can use the suggested settings to bring the workpiece to its final shape. If the operator needs to bend a batch of pieces, he may reduce the number of passes he needs to take to reach the final shape. But overall, it remains very much a collaborative process between a skilled operator and an intelligent controller. The operator isn’t just pushing buttons.

All this technology, Alderliefste added, really is designed not to replace a skilled operator, but to make him more productive. In custom rolling, replacing the skilled rolling technician really isn’t practical. “This is a new approach to the CNC,” Alderliefste said. “It’s really thinking like the operator.”

According to U.S. rolling shop veterans who attended the event, that operator lies at the heart of the rolling business. In rolling, an operator’s talent is a shop’s true differentiator, and that talent remains elusive.

Moscrip summed it up this way: “Believe me, if this were easy, everybody would be doing it.”

Davi Inc., 888-282-3284, www.davi.com

Holloway Company Inc., 800-869-8663, www.hollowaycompanyinc.com

Max Weiss Co. LLC, 888-649-3477, www.maxweiss.com

Oakley Steel Products Co., 877-980-6267, www.oakleysteel.com

Paramount Roll & Forming Inc., 888-400-3883, www.paramount-roll.com