New crane increases flexibility in GP annealing shop

Last year, GP added an additional heat-treatment furnace to annealing shop, resulting in a total of twenty-two furnaces capable of accommodating five thousand tons of rolls simultaneously. Now a new crane in this production area makes it possible to transport even large rolls with piece weights of up to 200 tons each. 

The heat treatment furnace and the crane did not come cheap, representing as they do investment expenditures totalling € 1.5 million. This, however, is more than made up for by substantial improvements in production flow and handling. Heat treatment is known to play a key role in manufacturing GP rolls and may take several weeks depending on the type of roll in question. Many roll qualities even pass through this branch of production more than once due to varying heat treatment cycles. It is worth the trouble in any case, because in the process it is possible to attain outstanding characteristics in terms of wear resistance and resistance to breakage.

High precision and accuracy are necessary where temperature control is concerned. For this reason, a reliable crew with many years of experience ensures that everything goes smoothly.

This, however, is not the end of GP’s investing in its annealing shop. Soon an additional heat treatment furnace will go online in this department, thus rounding out the capacity for manufacturing heavy rolls. This will then require additional investments totalling € 1.5 million.