ABOUT

COMMITTED TO TRUE SPECIALTY STRIP STEEL

 

Blair Strip Steel is one of the few remaining true strip steel mills in North America. As larger, volume-driven cold mills trend towards wider widths and commodity sheet products with “strip-like” characteristics, Blair has remained quality-driven, producing true strip steel. Blair has preserved the quality and uniformity benefits of traditional narrow width rolling and annealing. At the same time, we’ve integrated amazing PLC technology and productivity benefits to our two tandem cold mills, Big George and Little Tom - the same technology as the newest commodity cold mills anywhere in the world.

 

We like to say that Blair is both the oldest and most modern strip producer in North America. Blair’s roots as an iron smelter go back to the mid-1800’s, when Pittsburgh was the “Iron City”, not yet the “Steel City”. In the late 1800’s, when iron production gave way to steel production, Blair moved to the cold side of the new industry as a light gauge cold rolled strip mill, making precision steel strip for cash registers, typewriters and adding machines. In 1923, Blair reinvented itself again as a heavy gauge strip mill in order to supply the new, growing automobile industry, making strip steels for the Ford Model T and General Motors. Today, our company roots may be long, but they’re strong and our strip mill in New Castle, Pennsylvania is absolutely state-of-the-art, globally competitive and metallurgically-driven by talented and dedicated people throughout the mill operations. We utilize our tremendous experience and expertise to develop precision strip steel products for today’s automotive and aerospace industries.

 

Specifically, Blair is focused on the material and service needs of the heavy gauge fineblanking and stamping industries. In order to earn and support this growth, we offer the following:

 

• State-of-the-art annealing facilities insure the most tailored and uniform properties and microstructure;

• A full range of steel grades - alloy, high carbon, HSLA, low carbon, Japanese and European grades, electromagnetic iron and custom grades;

• Big George: The heaviest gauge strip mill in the world, from which we make FBQ (FineBlanking Quality) with the most spheroidized material available;

• Little Tom: A newly revamped two-stand, four-high mill capable of amazing accuracy, shape and flatness;

• A full range of thicknesses - applications from .0315" to .625" thick;

• The shortest production lead times in the industry - our nimble size, flexible operations and deep raw material inventory make us quicker than anyone for emergency requirements;

• Annual programs, blanket orders and forecasts insure the quality benefits of heat lot sourcing and on-time deliveries;

• Our experience and metallurgical expertise help design steel for intricate applications and provide solutions to your metalworking challenges.

 

Most importantly, we're listening to you and the steel-consuming industry. We’re planning for the future and ready to respond with new grades, unique properties, innovative supply programs, long term partnership agreements and whatever it takes to earn your business. We appreciate your business and are ready to serve for the next hundred years.

 

Thanks for your consideration.

 

Bruce A. Kinney

Chairman & CEO

 

 

 

Quality In Everything We Do

 

Blair is ISO-9001 and IATF 16949 certified by SRI through May 2020. We carefully choose and monitor our hot mill sources for quality. When possible, we match a preferred hot band supplier and heat lot quantities for each application to limit variation in chemistry and properties from coil-to-coil and order-to-order.

 

Blair does its own roll grinding to maintain control and consistency of the required surface texture.

 

Our lab facility performs testing for hardness, yield, tensile, elongation, microstructure, chemistry, surface topography and heat-treatment response.

 

We're proud to say our material quality reliability is demonstrated year after year by a rejection rate of less than 1/2% per year.

 

Blair's narrow-width tandem mills are designed to produce superior gauge control in very heavy gauge materials from low carbon to high carbon and alloy steels. Tolerances as tight as +/- .0005" are available on many items. Often, material is rolled at the finished width to insure the best control of shape elements like crown, wedge/taper and parallelism.

 

Overall, Blair is uniquely capable of producing consistent dimensions and properties in heavy thicknesses, head-to-tail, coil-to-coil, order-to-order and year-to-year.

Copyright © 2019 Blair Strip Steel Company.