Don’t know where you bought your degree Dallas Mike. But from experience as a welder and a heater at the Hot Strip MIll Furnaces in local steel mill for years, I know the melting point of steel. The furnaces have burners below and above the slabs entering the furnaces and they are heated as they are pushed through the furnaces. After going through these heating zones they are pushed onto a heart, where there are no skids below them. The heat on the heart heats the skid marks from the water pipes where thay are pushed through the furnaces removing the cold spots. These pipe are six inches in daimeter with a hole about one inch in diameter for pressurized water to continually flow through. The size of the slabs of steel are from 28″ to 49 1/2 inchse in width and from 4 1/2′ in to 10 ” in thickness. We heated these slabs to a temperarure of 2440 degrees in the soaking zones and 2420 degrees on the hearth. If the mill went down for any reason we had to cut back on the heat untill the mill started back up. If they sit to long without being pushed out they would start sweating and weld together. This would result in the mill having to shut down for several days to cool down enough to go inside the furnaces. These slabs were rolled through several mills until the thickness ordered by the customer was reached and then coiled up. We used natural gas, coke gas, and fuel oil to heat these furnaces. During extreme cold weather the gas company would cut off our gas supply and we would switch over to fuel oil. We had to mix this with high pressure steam in order to heat the furnaces. There was nothing in the plane fuel or inside the building to heat steel to a melting point, yet steel was seen pouring out of the upper part of these towers. enough said about this matter. you think one way and I think another.
