Final Thoughts

It’s 10 PM and I am on a flight back to Florida having spent the last three days in Fort Wayne, Ind. We hosted one of the largest Steel 101 workshops in our history and the workshop went well. We spent Wednesday going over the classroom materials and then that evening our workshop was hosted by Charlie Trowbridge and the Steel Dynamics team for a networking event that included dinner. If you are in downtown Fort Wayne, you will want to try out the Hoppy Gnome. SDI and the Hoppy Gnome put on a tremendous event, which also included Jerry Henry and Pete Henry from Paragon Steel who hosted our group on a tour of their service center earlier today.

Today (Thursday) our group toured the SDI Butler plant including the EAF’s, ladle metallurgical station, caster, hot strip mill, cold mill, galvanizing lines and paint line. After that tour had concluded, we move over to Paragon Steel, which is located next to SDI, and toured one of their facilities (there are two next to SDI). Their 180,000 square foot facility is holding 68,000 tons of inventory as they feed their three slitting lines. Paragon Steel slits hot rolled, HRPO, cold rolled, galvanized and prepainted steels.