US Steel / Bethlehem Steel generator rotor forging facility

Six-story-tall forging facility, originally used for WWI battleship gun barrels. 450-ton ingot → 200-ton forging after oxide loss and machining. Only one such facility remaining in the US; Bethlehem's steel plant is now an amusement park.

Did I show you this picture before of one of the generator rotors? This is the generator rotor forging, and this is in one of the plants — I don't remember if this is U.S. Steel or Bethlehem Steel. Probably only one of them exists anymore in the United States. Bethlehem's steel plant is now in an amusement park in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These are the stairs going up — one floor, two, three, four, five, six stories tall. And here's your forging, may run 200 tons at this point, started out as about a 450-ton forging. By the time you forged it and lost all the oxidation — because you had to leave it in the furnace for a week before you got it up to forging temperature, and you grew an oxide scale that's an inch thick, and when you forge it, that all just comes off — you have a lot of waste. Then you machine it, and you're going to heat treat it. This was basically a system where they made battleship gun barrels in World War I. Not a lot of facilities like that in the world — a lot of crane capacity, a lot of big height. That's generator rotor forgings.