Davenport Iowa Alcoa plate gauge variation / air knife

World's largest rolling mill, 8-ft × 15-ft rolls, rolling 747 wing plate. ~20% off-gauge plate. LFM student thesis ~1990 mapped the variation along plate length. Root cause: water from roll-cooling pooling on the curled end of hot plate, locally cooling and stiffening the aluminum, producing thicker ends. Solution: a $10,000 compressed-air knife. Alcoa's NIH culture refused to implement. Tom bet Owen Richmond $10,000 it wouldn't happen; a year later he was right.

Aluminum is nice because it has its own nice aluminum oxide. They probably do have some lubricant on there, but I haven't seen it, and you won't find a lot in the literature, because there's only so many companies that do it, and they don't like to tell everybody how they're doing it. It wouldn't be hard to duplicate. The world's largest rolling mill is located in Davenport, Iowa. It belongs to Alcoa, and they roll the plate for the wings of 747s.