Authored by Peter Chifo, Jr. For many years galvanizing and coatings have been applied over welded steel tubular products to provide protection against corrosion, enhance product appearance, and make the product more suitable for a specific end use. The vast majority of these coating systems were off-line operations that were cumbersome, labor intensive and required a significant amount of factory floor space. By the nature of their design, these off-line systems usually required work-in-process inventories, which often resulted in higher production costs. Recently, tube and pipe producers have been working to integrate as many operations in-line as practical, with the goal of optimizing efficiencies within the tube or pipe mill.
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