Over the past quarter century, Marvin Hole’s company, Aluminum Blanking, has grown from a small startup to a specialist in the toll processing of surface-sensitive materials.

By Dan Markham,
Senior Editor

• Quick Facts
  

Marvin Hole was a coil-handling equipment salesman in the 1970s when he saw a market opening.

Steel producers had already started to divest themselves of finishing operations, and he anticipated that aluminum companies would do the same.

“We had access to a lot of used equipment, and he contacted several mills to see if they had interest in cut-to-length aluminum coil, which they did,” says Eric “Rick” Hole, Marvin’s son and the current vice president and chief operating officer of Aluminum Blanking, Pontiac, Mich., the company his father founded in 1979.

Since then, Aluminum Blanking has grown into a toll processor with 105 employees working two shifts. The company processed 120 million pounds of aluminum last year and expects to handle 140 million pounds in 2006.
Aluminum Blanking operates seven blanking lines in three buildings totaling 180,000 square feet on the Pontiac site.

“We’ve had steady growth, with a couple of big jumps over the years. It’s a very capital-intensive business. When a building was busting at the seams, we’d plan an expansion with another building and new equipment,” Rick Hole says.

The company has little room left to repeat the process, since its three buildings occupy most of the available land. Room for internal growth is plentiful, however, as Aluminum Blanking is running well below its potential output. “We have a true capacity of 300 million pounds,” he adds.

Aluminum processing represents about 95 percent of the company’s business. It also handles a small amount of stainless steel. “Our forte is surface-sensitive material. We usually try to stick to the clean stuff,” Hole says.

Aluminum Blanking’s broad range of technical capabilities sets it apart from competitors, he says. “We’ve cut as narrow as one-inch wide material and we can corrective level up to 110 inches wide. We can go from 0.015-gauge up to half-inch-thick coil.”

Most of the seven blanking lines are dedicated to certain products. Maximum coil widths for the lines are 24, 36, 60, 75, 84, 108 and 110 inches, though the company also runs a few do-all lines, Hole says.

The equipment is a mixture of newer products and older pieces retrofitted to meet Aluminum Blanking’s specific needs. “We buy old equipment and have it rebuilt to bring it up to the latest and greatest specifications from a control standpoint,” Hole says. “Some of it we do ourselves and some of it we contract out.”

He points to a newer automotive line for closure panel body sheets, with older equipment retrofitted for automatic feed. The line features an end-vacuum belt stacking system with four carts to improve throughput.

“The key to our success is being able to do things other people can’t. We find innovative ways to process materials,” Hole says, such as blanking special shapes or using oscillating dies for circle blanking.

To meet the need for corrective leveling of heavy-gauge aluminum, Aluminum Blanking recently turned to Herr-Voss Stamco. The Callery, Pa.-based equipment supplier makes 40 to 50 levelers each year, but only three of the kind Aluminum Blanking required—a machine that could level coil up to 3/8th-inch thick.

The leveler installed on Aluminum Blanking’s 110-inch wide automatic coil feed line is three times the size of the standard Herr-Voss leveler. “It’s a big one, it’s a monster,” says Audie Dunbar, sales manager for precision levelers at Herr-Voss.

The leveler purchased by Aluminum Blanking is different from standard levelers in three ways, Dunbar explains: It’s a six-high design compared to four-high for most large machines; it has a 120-inch roll face; and it has 500 horsepower. “That’s enough horsepower to dim the lights in Pontiac,” Dunbar adds.

Such extreme power is necessary for precise leveling of aluminum, which is more difficult to handle than steel, Hole says. “What people don’t realize is that with aluminum, the modulus of elasticity is twice what it is for steel. To do the same corrective leveling to aluminum vs. steel, gauge for gauge, you’ve got to work the aluminum twice as hard, and it takes more horsepower to do that.”

Not only is more power required, Hole says, but the process demands more finesse. Aluminum is typically more abrasive than steel and it develops a protective oxide layer after it’s been exposed to air. If a company isn’t careful during the leveling process, the surface of the aluminum can be damaged. A light lubricant is applied to the leveler rolls to keep them from scratching, but that is not a guarantee.

“We use all high-polished chrome rolls, but even then the aluminum gets so dry and abrasive that sometimes it will start marring the surface or little pieces of it will adhere to our rolls,” Hole says. “It takes quite a bit more finesse and care to run aluminum than it does steel.”

Aluminum Blanking switched to the “monster” leveler because its existing line was designed to handle only up to quarter-inch material at 110 inches wide.

Customers wanted the company to process higher strength alloys, and some coils up to a half-inch thick. “We decided we needed to go to a bigger piece of equipment to handle material that was pushing the limits of our existing leveler,” Hole explains.

The new Herr-Voss Stamco leveler expands the market for Aluminum Blanking, which can now “pick up some of the heavier gauge that some of the mills are able to roll, not just aluminum but stainless steel as well,” he adds.

Aluminum Blanking typically toll processes coils from mills such as Novelis, Alcan and Alcoa, and dropships them directly to the mill’s customer. Often Aluminum Blanking is asked to produce blanks that meet the end customer’s precise specifications.

“As we’re finding out, a lot of the end-users are really looking at taking parts in and assembling them instead of doing a lot of the extra fabricating work themselves because of the labor, equipment and maintenance costs. They’d rather put the onus and burden on the supplier. They just want to stamp it or assemble it.”

Hole sees opportunity for Aluminum Blanking in this precision-blanking trend. “There’s a lot of cut-to-length capacity in the marketplace. We want to differentiate ourselves from that with our value-added capabilities.”

Value-added services provided by Aluminum Blanking include: flash annealing; electrostatic oiling, both traditional petroleum-based wet lube and dry lube; stringent surface defect inspection; surface-sensitive coil handling; crane and coil handling capacities in excess of 40,000 pounds; and sheet-lifting capability to 25,000 pounds and exceeding 60 feet in length.

Aluminum Blanking is also seeing gains from internal productivity improvements. The company’s Data Acquisitions System is a computer system that logs downtime and allows the company to track productivity in average pounds per hour.

“We’d like to be a little more automated and advanced on the technical side (than our competitors),” Hole says. Indeed, he knows of few competitors with the same focus on precision processing of surface-sensitive material. “I don’t think there’s anyone just like us out there.”