What Does the Future Hold for Leaded Steels?

12L14 and other leaded steels are no longer melted in the U.S.

by Miles Free III

Director of Industry Affairs, PMPA

Published February 1, 2025

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My 50-plus-year career in steelmaking and manufacturing took me to employment at mills and meltshops in four different states, four different melt shops and authority over quality at 10 steel mills — both hot and cold finished. Leaded steel was a product of these plants.

In addition to the aforementioned plants, our cold finished mills often sourced leaded steel hot roll bars from Inland Steel or Bethlehem Steel. We cleaned, cold drew and straightened these bars, selling millions of pounds for hose fittings, carburetor and fuel line parts and many other automotive and non-automotive applications. Leaded steels provided machining shops with economies of production through increased tool life, increased speed, increased production rates and superior as-machined surface finish. Leaded steels were the optimum input for the screw machining industry in those days.

While leaded steels were often the most important product for our sales throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were also enhanced grades: LedAX from Inland Steel and Beth Led B from Bethlehem Steel. Their higher price (mostly due to higher yield loss at the hot mill during rolling) could be justified when trying to hold difficult tolerances, finishes or cutting the finest threads. Despite the abundance of choices, the market was filled with rumors about the upcoming banning of lead, by customers, the Europeans or the EPA. A host of substitute materials — some containing bismuth, selenium, tellurium and even tin, were developed and brought to market. My counsel to our company’s customers — many of whom were PMPA multispindle screw machine shops making hose fittings for automotive and fluid power applications — was to not get too upset by all of these rumors. Leaded steels were plentiful in the market and would remain so despite all of the angst in the marketplace.

My final steel manufacturing employer, Republic, had two EPA permits to melt lead: one at Lorain, Ohio’s Basic Oxygen Furnace, and Continuous Caster (formerly U.S. Steel, where I was lab supervisor) and one at the Canton Electric Furnace Meltshop and Cast Roll (formerly Republic). I have been bullish on leaded steels as an appropriate and readily available input for our industry throughout my career.

Until the Lorain works (which had been integrated into the Bartech/ Republic Steel operations) were destroyed by a series of catastrophes starting with a cold weather fish-kill event. The fish clogged the cooling water intakes — crippling the blast furnaces. Without hot metal from the blast furnaces, there could be no steelmaking at the BOF/ Continuous Caster. An Electric Arc furnace was constructed to restore steelmaking at Lorain. A fire, just days before the scheduled start-up, made that construction a total loss. All steelmaking was destroyed at Lorain, which had one of the two valid EPA permits for melting leaded steel here in the U.S.

The Republic Canton Plant was owned by a Mexican firm, Grupo Simec. They shut down all of the Republic non- Mexican steel operations last summer when they moved all orders to their newer plant in Tlaxcala, Mexico (bit.ly/PMPA-PM0225a). The Republic Canton Meltshop had the second EPA permit for melting leaded steels.

All 12L14 and other leaded-grade special bar quality (SQB) bars that I know of in our shops are imported as hot rolled bars for cold drawing by U.S. or Canadian cold finishers from European sources — Germany and Great Britain being the primary countries of origin to my knowledge. There are supposed to be some changes in the British Steel Industry as they try to wean themselves off of Blast Furnace BOF production (Port Talbot) for “carbon/climate reasons,” which I expect could take the Brits out of the 12L14 game for more than a couple of years (bit.ly/PMPA-PM0225b).

Currently, the U.S. has tariffs imposed on steel bars coming in from overseas under Section 232. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, the tariffs increased the average prices of steel and aluminum by 2.4% and 1.6%, respectively, disproportionately hurting “downstream” industries that use steel and aluminum in their production processes. Despite no domestic source of leaded steels, our imports of leaded steel are still covered by the tariff “to protect” domestic industry.

The re-election of Donald Trump has ensured that tariffs will be a major policy in the new administration. So now that we are forced to purchase leaded steels overseas, because there is no domestic melt source, we will be forced to pay even higher prices due to cost off shipping, current tariffs and expected new additional tariffs. If our domestic cold finishers can find leaded hot roll to cold draw for our shops.

So, I am no longer as bullish about the prospects for leaded steel availability in the United States. To the best of my knowledge, we have lost all domestic melt capacity for leaded steels. Great Britain is closing their leaded steel producing operations for at least a year. And importing leaded steel — regardless of supplier or country of origin — will result in much higher costs due to transportation, ongoing and increasing tariffs. We have yet to see how proposed Carbon Border Adjustments, or “Carbon Taxes,” will impact the market or availability.

If there was a hope, it would be that under the new administration, U.S. steelmakers might find an opportunity to apply for a permit to produce leaded steel bars for machining. Quite unlikely. So, I would advise all of us, as precision machining shops and purchasers of precision machined components, to start researching to develop process modifications and investigate available steel grades, new tools and coatings that we can adopt to deliver similar performance and economics as our traditional leaded steels continue to decline in availability and application, while increasing in price.

Author

Miles Free III is the PMPA Director of Industry Affairs with over 50 years of experience in the areas of manufacturing, quality and steelmaking. Miles’ podcast is at pmpa.org/podcast. Email Miles

Urgency or Importance — Which Rules Your Day?

Poka-yoke your time — filter out the urgent so you can work on what is important.

by Miles Free III

Director of Industry Affairs, PMPA

Published January 1, 2025

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As a manager, as a supervisor, we are often driven by the “tyranny of the urgent.” Th at phone call that just came in, that rush order that “just has to get out,” or a host of other compelling things that insist “Get it done — now!” But is our obedience to the urgent even worth it? Perhaps as leaders, we need to recalibrate our reflexive obedience to the tyranny of the urgent, and instead invest in developing processes that make urgency a thing of the past.
One of the advantages of working at PMPA is that we get to collaborate with colleagues, members and truly talented, smart people. So, when this topic of urgency versus importance was brought up, I was pleased to hear PMPA’s Carli Kistler-Miller’s immediate impression: “You know, Miles, these are not mutually exclusive.” I can agree, the are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I hope to show that when they are, we should not give our service to the urgent.
Urgency is characterized by two characteristics:
1) Urgency is time denominated. If urgent items are not completed by a certain time — a deadline (how telling) —then they cannot be completed at all. 2) Th e tasks are not necessarily thoughtful or cognitive work. In our everyday language we define urgency as “putting out fi res.” It is interesting to me that the word comes from the Latin “urgentum,” which means “to press hard, to urge.” We can see from this fact that urgency is generally delivering for single constituency or beneficiary. An urgent need is literally, a “pressing” one. Synonyms for urgency include emergency, critical and desperate. It is the time limit that raises the emotional stakes for urgency.
Urgency, upon reflection, is a short-term focus. By definition, if the urgent task is not completed by the deadline, it is a failure. We are all motivated, incentivized, coached and counseled to avoid failure. No wonder that urgency is such a powerful tyrant, and we its obedient servants.
Importance is different from urgent in that, while important work may have a deadline, the deadline itself is not an aspect of importance. Importance suggests great significance — especially to the greater organization and all of its stakeholders. Synonyms of importance, which can help us see its meaning more clearly include vital, necessary and crucial. Interestingly, the synonyms for importance do not suggest being time-bound. They do, however, suggest great value or meaningfulness.
So, why is it that we permit urgency to dictate importance in our work lives? Th e time deadline is an obvious answer because if we fail to complete the urgent task by the deadline, we cannot complete at all. But is there more? Henry Mintzberg cited a 1956 study by Robert Guest, “Of Time and Foremen,” in Harvard Business Review that established that 56 foremen averaged 583 activities per eight-hour shift, an average of one activity every 48 seconds. Mintzberg describes the work pace for chief executives as “unrelenting.” If our management is so tied up doing the urgent, who is doing the important?
If an urgent task is being completed every 48 seconds, when does the important work get done? (Note: Th is was in 1956, before cell phones and email. Do we really think that the demands have decreased in urgency? If anything, these new technologies have raised the bar and shortened the deadlines.)
Another study of 160 British middle and top managers found, according to Mintzberg, that they worked without interruption for a half-hour or more only about once every two days. Again, this was before internet, email and cell phones. Urgency, it seems, is a feature — not a bug — in managerial and supervisory work.
Our highest and best use, regardless of our organizational title in our shops, is to continuously improve our processes and performance. How much time is left in our eight- hour shift ( wink, wink, nudge, nudge) for continuous improvement? How much time is left for the other important, high-value work that is ours and ours alone, as leaders, managers and supervisors? How much quality time is the tyranny of the urgent stealing from us as loving parents, siblings and good friends?
It is my observation that things move from important to urgent when our systems and processes fail. But rather than address our system failures directly, we respond, like conditioned subjects in a psychology experiment, to respond to the urgent stimulus.
Quality is the absence of waste. When we focus on the merely urgent, allowing them to fill our day, we are stealing our highest and best work from our company, from our team and from our loved ones. Track the urgent issues that are stealing your attention and efforts from what is truly important. I am convinced that if we spent just 10% more time on the important, rather than the urgent, our shops would be even more productive, profitable and even happier places to work. It is time for a revolution to remove the tyrant of urgency in our lives.
Do not let the deadline of time bully you into spending your precious time doing the urgent, rather than the important. Time is the greatest waste as it is truly unrecoverable. Poka-yoke your time. Filter it by urgency
to target the processes needing improvement. Identify, improve, change or eliminate the processes that are creating needless urgency in your company. Celebrate the processes and the people that drive the processes and deliver the important work without urgency, hysterics or emotional blackmail.
Urgency gives us that psychology experiment reward
in the short term. But have we done the emotional and business multivariate calculus as to what it is truly costing us and our performers in the long run?
And as for whether urgency and importance are mutually exclusive, I will have to wait until my colleague Carli comes back from her well-earned vacation.

Author

Miles Free III is the PMPA Director of Industry Affairs with over 50 years of experience in the areas of manufacturing, quality and steelmaking. Miles’ podcast is at pmpa.org/podcast. Email Miles