For most of us, mandatory recycling is relatively new. It has only been over the past five years that municipalities around the country have instituted programs that require residents to recycle glass, paper, plastic, aluminum and tin cans. These programs, which are designed to decrease the pressures on landfills, have created a whole new industry that transforms existing products like plastic bottles or aluminum cans, into a new raw material or product.
   

Though this process sounds new, it is well known that the automotive and paper industries have been recycling discarded products for years. There is one group, however, that has been recycling well before the concept came into vogue. They’re called rerollers, and they’ve been around since the late 1800s. What makes rerollers unique is that they convert used steel train rails and train axles into new products without remelting the steel.
One of the oldest rerollers in the United States today is the Jersey Shore Steel Company, located near Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. “I’m not sure how they came up with the name,” said Dave Keister, Jersey Shore Steel’s plant engineer. “The closest shore is the west branch of the Susquehanna River.” He added that the shoreline of New Jersey is about 200 miles from the mill.
   

Keister went on to talk about the history of the business and Jersey Shore’s place in that history. The rail rerolling process started in 1863 in Syracuse, New York by the Sweets family which founded Sweets Steel. At that time they rerolled Bessemer steel rails and locomotive tires. In the early 1900s Sweets Steel moved its equipment to Williamsport, Pennsylvania. In 1938, John A. Schultz, then president of Sweets Steel, left the company to start his own rerolling facility, Jersey Shore Steel.
   

In the first half of the 20th century, small rerolling mills produced bar stock for agricultural implements and fence posts; light rails and splice bars for the mining industry; angles for furniture and shelving; and concrete reinforcing bar or rebar for the construction industry. Then, after World War II, as small steel plant technology developed, and the availability of railroad rails declined, many mills installed electric melting furnaces and later, continuous casting machines. In Jersey Shore Steel’s case, the mill continued to roll angles (angle iron) after the war and has continued to do so ever since. Today, Jersey Shore Steel is the largest reroller of iron used in the manufacture of bed frames in the United States. It is quite likely that the bed or convertible sofa in your house or apartment is made from Jersey Shore Steel’s angle iron.
Advantages of rerolled steel

When talking about the rail rerolling process, Keister pointed to the advantages that rail steel provides. “Rail steel is a high carbon, high strength steel. When you compare it to mild steel a 0.109″ thick piece of rail steel has the same strength as a piece of mild steel that’s 0.125″ thick. That difference of about sixteen thousandths (0.016″) gives our customers more parts per ton.” Keister also pointed to the properties of rail steel saying that the heating and rerolling process increases the density of the steel’s grain structure giving it an even higher strength to weight ratio. “That’s important to our customers. They get a lighter gauge, high strength steel that weighs less than a comparable mild steel product.”
The rerolling process
The rerolling process starts with a steel rail that’s approximately 11 feet long. The rail goes into a furnace where it is heated to approximately 2,250 degrees F. When the rail comes out of the furnace, it is exposed to a high pressure water system that removes the scale (rust and dirt that formed on the outside of the rail). The cleaned and heated rail is then moved to the “slitter” where it is cut into three pieces (See Fig. 1) The head and flange are rolled into one size angle and the web is rolled into a smaller size angle. On the average, an 11-foot rail is converted into three pieces of angle steel approximately 120 feet long.
   

A rerolling mill is an extremely hostile environment for bearings, especially at the intermediate and finishing end of the mill, where the steel starts to cool rapidly. “At the intermediate end, the steel is at about 1,850 degrees F,” said Keister. In this application, there are loads in excess of 50,000 kilograms and speeds of up to 300 rpm. Under these conditions, average bearing life for the standard four-row tapered roller bearing was a year and a half. “Before the mill switched to SKF they had one bearing that actually lasted only 63 hours,” said Rick Reidy, the Applied Industrial “Technologies account representative. The cages were breaking, which in turn would generate enough heat that the roll neck and inner ring would actually weld together. When we called on SKF to see if they could solve the cage and heat problem, they came in and did a complete assessment of the application. They supervised the next installation and made a number of recommendations along the way. Nick Matteo, the SKF steel specialist, told us during that first installation that the helical grooves machined into the bore of the SKF bearing should prevent the inner ring from welding to the roll neck. He was right. We haven’t had any cages break since that first installation and we also haven’t had any more problems with the bearing welding to the roll neck.”
   

Since that first installation SKF’s Matteo and Applied’s Reidy have been working with Jersey Shore to continually improve the mill’s productivity. Matteo’s latest suggestion was to try sealed bearings. “The idea made sense, so we approached Dave Keister at the mill,” said Reidy. “Dave seemed anxious to try the new bearings as soon as possible because he felt that even though improvements had been made to the sealing arrangement, it could improve even further.”
   

“The new sealed bearings have been working great,” said Keister. “Since we started using SKF we’ve been able to double bearing life in the mill. And now, with the new sealed bearings we’re hoping to quadruple bearing life.”
   

According to Keister, the new sealed bearing provides a number of advantages. “The new seal keeps grease ‘in’ and water ‘out’ of the bearing. And that’s really the key in this application.” He went on to add that a secondary benefit is the reduced maintenance costs of a sealed bearing. “Before we went to a sealed bearing we had to regrease the bearings in the mill every eight hours. That was a lot of grease. So not only do we save on grease, we also save on maintenance costs and grease reclamation costs.”
Nick Matteo