| ISSUE 023 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| The Army states its artillery goal in rounds: 100,000 155mm rounds a month, a target Army Contracting Command New Jersey cited in July 2024. The deadline was October 2025, and it passed. Production stood at 36,000 rounds a month in March 2026, the Pentagon’s Inspector General reported in July 2026, and the report named projectile metal parts as the limiting factor. | |
| HF-1, the High Fragmentation 1 steel of the M795 and M1128 projectile bodies, is melted, cast and rolled at Metallus’s Faircrest plant in Canton, Ohio, and heat treated at its Gambrinus plant in the same city, according to the contracting command’s July 2024 account. The same mills sell alloy bar into industrial, automotive, aerospace and energy markets, according to the company. | |
| In February 2024 the Army agreed to fund an increase in HF-1 capacity from 1,500 to 6,720 tons a month. In September 2026 the Defense Logistics Agency became a buyer alongside the shell makers, contracting for HF-1 for the National Defense Stockpile, DLA said in May 2026, with a $995 million ceiling and a first order of about $125 million on 29 September, according to the company. | |
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| PLATE · ELECTRIC ARC FURNACE MELT SHOP UNDER CONSTRUCTION, CANTON, OHIO, 1984 |
| On 18 September 1984, in a memorandum to the US Trade Representative, President Reagan declined the carbon and alloy steel import relief the International Trade Commission had recommended. He directed negotiated restraint agreements instead, with the stated hope that imports would return to about 18.5 percent of the US market, excluding semi-finished steel. In December 1984 Japan agreed to hold its shipments to 5.8 percent of the US market, the International Trade Commission reported in April 1985. |
| Eight days after the memorandum, Reagan spoke in the unfinished melt shop at Timken’s Faircrest plant in Canton. Timken had committed two-thirds of its net worth to the plant, IndustryWeek reported in 2012, and its electric arc furnace poured a first heat on 5 August 1985. The company later called it the only completely new alloy steel plant built in the United States since the Second World War. |
| The restraint agreements were set to run five years, from 1 October 1984 to 30 September 1989, and governed import volumes at the border, by market share or by quota. Faircrest was a private process investment by a bearing maker that made its own steel. Under Metallus, it is the operation the Army has paid to expand. |
| PLATE · BLOOM REHEAT, HF-1 STEEL, CANTON, OHIO | |||
| On 26 August 2026 the Army and Metallus commissioned two furnaces and saw-line upgrades in Canton, funded through a $99 million Army agreement, which at full capacity can make enough HF-1 for more than 120,000 155mm metal parts a month, the Army said in September 2026. That is steel for unfilled bodies, not rounds, and metal-parts production is where the Inspector General found the shortfall. | |||
| The contracting command described the agreement in 2024 as the company’s first with the government as a prime contractor; it had typically supplied steel as a subcontractor to the companies that make the shell bodies. The Army bought the capacity increase through an agreement written for prototype projects. | |||
| The heat treatment runs at Gambrinus, which Timken opened as a steel plant in 1929. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
