In doing research for an automotive stamping plant, it looks like an average modern plant can ship around 150 tons per day of finnished stampings (7 days week, 365 days of the year.) In my estimates, this would be about 2 hy-cubes per day, but how many outbound gons of scrap? I’ve heard some stamping oeprations (non automotive and automotive) can average over 50 percent scrap.
How many inbound coils would that be? Would the coils go to an off-site place for blanking and then trucked to the plant?
Some plants also had in-house electric/boiler operations. How much coal would they recieve?
Would cutting oils and other things arrive by rail as well?
I have been to a few stamping plants in the early eighties. From what I saw they had blanks already cut and stacked on pallets banded and ready to stamp. The dies for cutting the individual parts were designed to minimize waste and scrap and sheets were sized to fit the dies. They would cut dash, fenders and other sheet parts from one sheet of steel then the individual pieces would got to separate forming dies to be made into the parts. Even though the plants were set up to take rolled steel sheet that part of the plant was shut down. I guess it was cheaper to buy it already sheared and stacked on pallets. From what I saw everything was handled by box cars or trucks. Most of the finished parts were shipped by truck. Local scrap dealers hauled the waste out with their own trucks.
Since fenders and body panels tend to ‘cube’ out before they 'weigh" out 150 tons of stampings might end up being 3 cars. Depends on the stamping.
50% waste seems very high for 1995. About the most waste I have seen is stamping round blanks from rectangular stock but that only has about 25-30% waste.
Figure it by weight you have all the information.
150 tons output + 33% waste (50 tons) = 200 tons of coil. That’s two 100 ton cap coil gons or three 70 ton loads of coil.
They would keep two gons on hand to load scrap. Each day they would part fill one and then the next day finish that one and start the next.
So its 2 or 3 coil gons a day inbound, with 2 or 3 boxcars of parts outbound a day and a gon every other day or so of scrap.
Zero, by 1995 it would be oil or gas fired.
Probably nothing else except once every 20 years or so they might get a transformer or stamping machine by rail.
That scrap rate seems very high to me from what I’ve seen in the plants. Today it’s like around 10% or less with computer programs. Those programs were new around then and the idea was around way before then. The concept of nesting and other things along with a high production rate of identical components in the auto industry results in minimal scrap. If this were not an auto plant, I would imagine higher scrap. From what I know, the scrap rate might have been around 10% to 20%. Keep in mind too that components have been increasingly designed for reduced scrap.