I/N Tek rolls.

• Author: Pethe, L. Gary
• Position: Joint venture between Inland Steel Industries Inc. and Nippon Steel Corp.

Inland's half-billion dollar joint venture with Nippon Steel begins production in New Carlisle.

New Carlisle is a lot like other small Indiana towns. The pace is laid-back. People are hard-working and friendly. Now, unlike most Indiana towns, New Carlisle has nearly 1 billion worth of manufacturing facilities growing just a stone's throw from its eastern boundary. A company called I/N Tek is responsible for that local development.

I/N Tek is a joint venture announced in March 1987 of steel industry giants: inland Steel Industries, Inc., a large U.S. steel maker, and Japan's Nippon Steel Corp., the world's largest steel producer. Commercial production began at the complex this March. According to John Selky, I/N Tek president, when a full-production level is reached, the plant is expected to turn out 3,000 tons of steel a day.

The I/N Tek facility is the world's most advanced cold-rolled steel finishing mill, say company officials. The cold-rolling technology used at the New Carlisle plant is patterned after Nippon's pilot plant in Hirohata, Japan. The high technology that I/N Tek brings to the finishing phase of steel sheet production has many competitive advantages in a tough, global marketplace. High-quality sheet steel is used extensively in such products as automobiles, home appliances, office furniture and agricultural machinery.

Sheet steel begins with a "hot rolling" process in which a 10-inch-thick slab of steel is heated to 2,200 degrees F., then reduced to a coil of sheet less than 1/8-inch thick. The sheet steel then must go through another process called "cold rolling." This produces the thicknesses, textures, integrity and strength that today's sophisticated end products require.

The cold-rolling process began to evolve in the early 80s. Inland Steel was intrigued by Nippon's strides in this technology. "The whole latter half of the finishing process had been automated and was continuous," says Frank Luerssen, inland's chairman. "And because of the continuous sequence, and the fact that it runs at continuous speed, it produced product uniformity never seen before."

The manufacture of cold-rolled products always had been a "batch" process, rather than a continuous one. Five major production steps were required, each performed separately, often in different buildings. It was a slow, complex process in which the steel had to be coiled and uncoiled at least five times. That made the product's consistency difficult to control, since...