I visited this factory in 1998,as part of the European hanggliding competition. The factory was sponsoring the event and many employees volunteered. Very friendly people in Slovakia and amazing memories.

WOW ! Finally, someone does a great job telling us just what is going on in a manufacturing process. Veru enjoyable ! Thank you !

For those saying its not clear, they describe 2 types of tube, hot formed and cold drawn. At 6:04 a press punches holes in red hot short billets At 6:33 a mandrel rod is placed in the tube (they dont show it) then it is sent through the elongater. (Rolling dies) The rolling dies squash the tube onto the mandrel rod. The inside diameter stays the same, they can roll more or less for different wall thickness, At 6:53 when the finished tube rolls onto the rack, you can see the mandrel rod still inside the tubes, yet to be removed. At 8:23 he describes cold drawn tube. At 8:43 it shows the cold tube being pulled through the dies which makes the tube smaller and longer. They start with a 32mm tube then pull it cold through smaller and smaller dies to get the size they want. The dies are just basically holes in hardened steel. The machine pulls it through the dies with enormous force. For precision cold drawn, they may use a mandrel rod for this process too for the inside diameter.

The design and execution of the machinery always amazes me. It amazes me that someone has had the ability to see something in their mind and in the manufacture of this, the machine comes to life. Any form of steel, I love.

The whole reason I watched this, was to find out how they start the hole in the tube. If your not paying close attention, you will miss it, I had to go back and watch it again. That is the most important part of a seamless tube, it should be more apparent in the film.

Nice.I've only seen steel tubes with seams in Canada here.I had always wondered how they did it.Besides I got a great European history lesson.I spent 10 years working in a Zinc refinery and your team and management is key.These people know what they are doing .Bravo.

Strangely the part about how it goes from solid to tube isn't covered that well.

Congratulations on the soothing voice... I caught the first 2 minutes and the credits . Very interesting .

This is a DAMN incredible video! I work with steel quite frequently, forging tube from blanks and bars over mandrels by hand. Seeing how it is done industrially was a major mind blow.

This was interesting as I used be involved in making far bigger seamless pipes in Scotland. The process was fairly simple, take a round billet of steel, heat it up until glowing hot, put in a huge 3 story press and using 1000 tonnes of pressure punch a hole down the middle to create a bottle. Then pass to the next stage which pushed a mandrel bar through he middle to create a bloom, the bar is then threaded onto a internal bar, creating the diameter, the biggest was 300mm. It then passes into a mill with kidney shaped pilger mill, which squeezed a collar of metal and rolled it onto the bar. I was only an apprentice at the time, but the process was impressive. Apparently these were far superior for oil drilling than welded tubes, being able to withstand higher pressures.

The whole thing seems kind of hollow and really drawn out.

Very well done. THANK YOU to ALL the men who work this job!!

Very intelligent, and very brave men indeed to be able to process and guarantee all this work which will find itself being applied to make our home comforts. Congratulations and thank you all.

incredible to see this---big thanks (wish i wee younger)

Awesome that they got Robert Miles to do the soundtrack for this video. RIP legend.

Great informative video about a very necessary component of modern living. well narrated. Everybody should know something about steel. BUT it should be mentioned that iron alloys in varying forms, not quite modern steel, has been around for way over 1000 years!

You are the company. You have a backbone of steel.

Solid to tube :the conversation process, superbly explained

Excellent production, very educational. Thanks a lot.

So amazing, all the processes, the heating and reheating, the pulling and the reshaping, the use of different gases in the curing process. How did man make the machines that he uses to make the materials to make the machines? It's almost like, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" It's crazy.

Excellent detail and very educational. Thank you for the trouble and effort!

Interesting that steel is 100% recyclable. Very good vid. After reading the comments I now know how they get the hole down the middle.

Excellent video! Steel is modern life.

Really impressive.

Very nicely done video, depicting all the different things and processes without unnecessary stupid joes like on the "How it's made" show. Bravo! :)

The best way to produce seamless tubes by far. Nice facilities.

The ingot becomes a tube at the piercing press when it's forced into a circular mold. It's then driven onto a mandrel rod to be drawn out further.

Thank you for this video comrade.

I am glad to see that the counties that once made up czechoslovakia are getting their manufacturing back. In times past they were powerhouses of steel and related industries.

We're constructing a state-of-the-art facility for seamless pipe and tube production, featuring cutting-edge technology and processes. There are only a handful of plants worldwide dedicated to manufacturing seamless pipes and tubes, and I feel fortunate to be the Project Management Consultant for this construction.

It is an amazing process - one we take too much for granted. Although the conversion from steel billets to tubes itself was not covered well, as one would expect from the title.

Putting the 'hole' in the billet is a violent, dramatic process. The billet is fed to what was called a piercer which sqashed the billet between 2 massive profiled axial rollers, this then fed the rotating billet onto a shaped plug on the end of a long mandrel. Effectivley rolling the billet onto the plug creating a void. this void continued until the tail of the billet passed over the plug. Quite spectacular when it went wrong. The rollers were driven by 2000HP DC motors through a gearbox the size of a small house. This was just the beginning of the process. The mandrel was stripped out of the hollow billet and the the billet was sent onto a '3 roll sizer' , 11 stand straightener then chopped up into required lenght for further processing. Final processing was done by Cold Reducing. A big German machine as I recall. TI Desford Tubes was the place. 3 Hot mills producing the tube and 2 Cold Reducing mills. 1971-74 I was there as a mechanical apprentice. All gone now. The way of most of British Industry. Brought back memories though, Cheers.

Subscribed right away! Awesome production! Presentation quality is at a level that raises "The Bar" for everyone else! Bravo! Truly enjoyed it!

Amazing! Steel are everywhere

those are some high quality chubes!

Good explantion.Thanks

Used to work at a plant in Desford Leicestershire which was part of TI, Tube Inestments. The machines are called three roal piercers. Massive billets would come down the M1 from Sheffield and would be heated in a massive rotary hearth furnace. The white hot steel would then be spun literraly around a central mandrel of the desired inside diameter. Further precise finishing could be undertaken by massive cold rolling machines and cooling processes together with the specification of the steel would define the metallurgical properties of the finished tube or hollow bar which would then be shipped to companies like British Timken to make inner and outer races of bearings etc. Some would go for gear cutting etc..Those were in the days before a well known PM decided that "people didn't want to work in factories any more" They obviously would be far happier picking packages in Amazon warehouses or stacking shelves at Asda.

I'll comment. Thats just incredible stuff. I've done some mine and smelter work but I've never seen anything like this. When I watch stuff like this it reminds me of how many really smart (way smarter than I) people there are and have been. Definitely shows me I don't know much although I thought I knew a lot.

I had this audio cd 20 years ago when i was a raver and listened to techno... robert miles.

Congratulations for this video....

an informative video finally

Great video!!!

Thank you.

8:15 "hydraulic acid". You mean 'hydrochloric' acid, surely, used for 'pickling' the steel?

InTeReStiNg ViDeO. I promise to never complain about the price of tubing, again. Clearly I get it for GR8T price! Cheers.

we are the company our backbone is made of steel. Simply awesome!

Absolute banger of a soundtrack

Nice mix of music. Though I dislike "techno" music, this piece was a very calming arrangement. Next, the volume of narrator and music was smooth. I did not have to readjust my volume between music and spoken word. Great job !

GOOD VIDEO, SALUDOS !! FROM: THE BRONX , NEW YORK ..

The subtitles for the silence was my favorite part.

I used to know a man called M Lipman who owned a company called Tube Investments and I was told he sold almost all of the pipes used in oil fields. Thats the interesting thing about pipes is that they come in all shapes and sizes and made out a wide range of materials from metallic alloys and biodegradable materials. The world recycles.

Look at all of the steel stuff needed to make the pipe. Claw cranes, massive furnaces, all those cast metal parts. Just making the assembly line capable of tons of product at a time is its own show.

"Hydraulic Acid" at 8:14 is an error. 'Hydrochloric Acid' may have been in the script. Nice documentary.

Brilliant!

I am glad i watched this i always wondered how they made tubes,I ma still in the dark

Nice!!

How does it go from solid rod to a hollow tube or pipe?

very cool!

Pretty insane, so much steel made or recycled.

That music made me think I had died and I was a spiritual being floating through the afterlife. I used to work at a steel mill that made seamless oil drill pipe. It's interesting when you can see the entire process

I watched it twice to see how the solid bars turned into tubes and I couldn't find it. that's the most important part to me.

I watched this video while playing with my CZ 75 BD. Another example of czech steel.

Great!!!!!

This work is essential to the well being and prosperity of all mankind; take note of those who oppose it and ask why and then use your better judgement as to the real reason they are against it.

What a great video!

Do you need to polish tube inner outer surface ?

Brilliant

Good job Paul....maybe next time I will supervise the commentary record.

Cool video!

Anyone else miss the part where a solid bit of metal gets a hole running through it?

It appears that when it goes through the "elongator" it comes out as a tube. My guess is that the elongator spins the steel so fast that centrifugal forces cause the center to expand outwards thus creating the tube.

Very well produced ! Bravo !

Excellent video to understand the manufacturing process. Repeat video to see in detail.

Strange, I watched it.... I swear I did! Yet I never seen the process where it becomes a tube. One min. it is a slug, then it is a tube.

Great music and photography. I missed where the solid bars were turned into tubes. When did that happen? I see it. 6:10, the piercing press. Thank you.

oh..no..that brake metal..is so precious...

This has left me grappling with a lot of existential questions, not least of which: 1) if blooms can be manufactured with a circular cross section, why do we need to roll the square ones? 2) What is hydraulic acid?

5:26 Still not a word about seamless tubes production!

So cool. We have at anyone time about 100 tons of metal stock at my dads shop. Tube, square tube, bar stock, flat stock, sheet, 1095, 1085,1065,1055, Inconel 618,718 Titanium etc. Weekends I’ll go in and get cut offs of titanium and 1095 and make a Bush knife with titanium handles.

The ads won't let me skip them!

The subtitles are the best part.

It is nice. You are hiding the process of transformation of solid to seem less tube

US needs more of this kind of production... too many of these types of processes are being outsourced out of the country and too many service jobs are taking their place... This steel tube plant... you can see how your work produces real value... customer service jobs, on the other hand, are HELL for people with souls... too many people call just to abuse the customer service agents. I worked in phone customer support for 18 years. The last 4 years... well, I quit a couple months ago, I would rather starve (and am selling everything I own trying to get a REAL job) than ever go back to that dead end hell.

Thankyou for posting this video. It is am amazing technology. I am still puzzeled as to how other metals are removed from the iron scraps in the first place. I know they are chopped and perhaps magnetically seperated but still, there must be other scraps carried through with them. Also, what is done with the left over metals?

Thanks for sharing ! i'm in you friend list

Very interesting but I would have liked an explanation of how it goes from solid round bar to hollow tube.

Neat!

After watching this I’m awestruck at what we humans have managed to figure out everything we have so far. If I was alone in the mountains I wouldn’t have any idea how to obtain raw iron from the rocks. Let alone build an iPhone from scratch!!

Parabéns 🤝

Robert Miles

Fascinating! Although a little more clarity on the mandrel process would have been welcome. Obviously raw iron has to enter the picture at some point via blast furnaces. However, today less and less 'new' iron is produced as recycling can recover a larger percentage of already formed steel. Going from the video this seems to be where the majority of this company's steel comes from. The most key part of all this is the meticulous analysis of the chemistry of the liquid steel. This allows modern steel to perform better than any that has ever been made throughout history. In the past access to especially well performing steel was down to chance and depended largely on the characteristics and fortuitous impurity of what came out of the ground. Some features could also be laboriously added via a specific manufacturing process such as repeated folding or highly rudimentary and non-repeatable carburization.

Beautiful!

Fascinating! And the part where it becomes a tube IS covered. Just watch and listen better! 6:29

Cool machine. Cool technical.

Sounds good 👍👍👍

If you look closely at the pressing process at 6:04, in the piercing press, the 1 meter long square steel block gets pushed down and then it is pushed back up as a big fat 1-meter long tube. The glowing insides of the tube obscure the fact that there is a hole down the center of the resulting cylinder. Then the drawing process extends the length and narrows the tube in the process to the desired measurements. It draws that 1 meter long cylinder-tube to 20 meters. Then the tube is drawn out some more depending on the desired tube size. It says it can draw tubes to 90 meters, which is about 270 feet, but doesn't say what the resulting diameter is at that length. Then cut to desired lengths. But if one wanted a 90-meter long tube, how could one ship such a tube?

Very nice

Does the chrome plating process use Cr6+, hexavalent chromium?

Amazing

Very nicely done ... I am .0000021% smarter now and I still have a long way to go after all, I am only 80 so I have a lot of time!