Steelastic completes puzzle with new system

HANOVER, Germany—Machinery maker Steelastic Co. L.L.C. has been a bit cryptic in its marketing efforts in recent weeks.

The Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio-based producer of equipment used in tire component preparation has been urging its customers and perspective clients to "Think Small" or "Go Calenderless."

Steelastic, part of the Heico Tire & Rubber Group, started the campaign in conjunction with its unveiling of the firm's Extruded Textile Body Ply System.

The company launched the system at the Tire Technology Expo, and said it is the first option on the market that can replace the textile calender and offline cutting equipment that currently is used to produce all textile body plies, according to Steelastic President Ian Dennis. He discussed the new offering during the expo, held March 5-7 in Hanover.

Steelastic also said the new extruded textile body ply system is the last piece in the puzzle that would enable tire manufacturers to open up smaller, more flexible tire plants that would not need costly calendering and auxiliary equipment. The other Steelastic options that can be used in lieu of calendering equipment include its extruded steel belt equipment, which was recently upgraded; an extruder to produce innerliner and single compound components; and an extruded textile cap strip line, needed only for production of some higher performance, low-profile tires.

"If you build a tire plant with all of this calendering equipment for the reinforcement layers, there's a reason there's no tire plants making fewer than 4 million tires a year," Dennis said. "That's because you cannot get this equipment and get a return on your investment unless you make that many tires."

He said there are some players in the tire manufacturing industry that are looking for an option that would make it feasible to build a smaller tire plant that would allow for quicker changeovers and production of a wider variety of stock-keeping units. Such factories could be located in the markets where the tires would be sold.

The problem until now is that there was no alternative to produce the textile body plies.

"When I came into the business I said if we had this option you could go full calenderless," Dennis said. "Then a tire plant could put down a million tires a year. You could start with a million and grow by 500,000 tires at a time by implementing this small flexible equipment that's very versatile, has low operator input, is easy to change over and is highly flexible."

Development push

So over the past two to three years, Steelastic has invested about $2.5 million into equipment and research and development costs toward making this calenderless technology possible, he added.

About the first year was used toward designing the machine itself, and the rest of the time has been dedicated toward perfecting the splicing technology, which Dennis said is the key to making the system work.

In traditional calender operations, the strips of materials are 6-feet wide, he said, and are then chopped up and spliced to make the finished body ply. But with Steelastic's technology, the extruded material is only 10 inches wide, meaning there are more splices in the tire.

"The challenge here is with multiple splices in the tire, the splice integrity has to be perfect," he said.

Steelastic has worked to ensure it extrudes the right lip on the edges of the material. After it's spliced and expanded in the tire building process, the cords have to align the same as they are in the rest of the material, the company president said.

With the system, more than 300 individual textile cords come into the die. It goes through an accumulation and cooling system, then the 10-inch wide strip of rubber-coated textile is fed into the cutting system. The section is fed through, cut and spliced, and a piece is created that is the correct size for the ply for the tire.

The machinery firm has been working with two top 10 tire makers on the project, according to Dennis: one to produce passenger car radials and the other to produce aircraft tires. The results from the PCR tire are not complete yet, but he said the partner is excited by the tests thus far. It has been through building and lab testing, but hasn't had track testing yet.

"They're telling us the splice integrity is absolutely superb," he said. "Harmonics, balance, everything is equivalent to or better than calendered material. And that's what we needed because there is no way the market would adopt this technology without it being comparable to calendered material."

Market breakthrough

Besides the two partners it's been working with, Dennis said the rest of the top 10 tire makers talked with Steelastic during the Tire Technology Expo, as a number are starting to pursue the idea of the smaller tire factory. An R&D chief even was waiting at the Steelastic booth when the expo opened so he could be first in line for discussions.

Thus far the equipment maker is looking to move slowly. "We now say we have the capability, but we're not actually selling equipment right now," Dennis said. "We're asking them to bring in the material and single end textile cord to our facility, and we've got a full-scale prototype machine in our facility. We'll make some material with it, they can take it away, build tires with it, and validate it themselves. That's how we're going to get buy-in."

And there is also the marketing push, pitching that customers can get a more flexible production facility and a quicker return on investment than with calendering equipment. "It's a little bit out of left field, but that's the whole ethos here," he said. "You can go small and flexible. That is particularly of interest to new market entrants."

Dennis added that the technology can be used for greenfield plants, but also to expand current plants where the calendering equipment is at maximum capacity. "You could nicely add 1 million tires a year with one Steelastic belt machine," he said. "It brings high versatility and multi-SKU capability. It gives you better scheduling options on production.

"If you're going to build 15 million tires, you're going to buy a calender. If you're looking to put a smaller, more flexible plant in a market where the tires are going to be consumed, this is opening all kinds of options for you."

Steelastic officials aren't naive to think customers will buy the system without validating the process, so that's where the company is aiming its focus currently. There are two staffers that are spending most of their time running the demo equipment in the 100,000-sq.-ft. facility in Cuyahoga Falls.

"We do expect both of our industry partners to buy the equipment very soon," Dennis said. "It will probably be in R&D facilities initially, and then move out into the production plant. I think that's the way it will go for awhile."

He said Steelastic is targeting 5 percent of a potential $300 million market over the next five years, according to the Steelastic official. "It's not huge but achievable. It could easily be more than that if people start jumping on this smaller, more flexible tire plant idea."

And Dennis is appreciative of parent company Heico's support of a project that may not give an immediate payback. "In our strategic plan, we've laid it out to them that this is a long game," he said. "It needs sustained effort and they've supported us with that capital investment to be able to make this and other equipment a reality."