It Takes Balls

 

Kansas City had the best balls.

The small ones were perfectly round, like marbles, only they were made of steel.

The big ones were the largest in the United States, up to 5-1/2 inches in diameter and weighing 26 pounds.

Copper and gold miners threw Kansas City’s balls into giant tumblers with ore blasted from mountains in Utah and Nevada. The balls pulverized that rock better than balls made anywhere else — an average of 5 percent better.

Banging balls together tens of thousands of times until they broke, and monkeying with chemistry and heat, Kansas City engineers had found a nearly perfect combination of hardness and toughness for grinding balls. The Chinese had copied the hardness, but their balls shattered like glass.

So in 1995, Kansas City steelworkers set out to make the biggest, baddest grinding-ball plant ever. Their company, GS Industries, was all that remained of Kansas City’s steel industry, and by then its factory had been reduced to a few pockets of productivity amid rusted cathedrals, vacant metal buildings that stood as sorrowful reminders of a much busier time. In its heyday, the local steel plant covered 1,000 acres of east Kansas City, a wide swath roughly following I-435 from Independence Avenue to the Missouri River. Railroad tracks crisscrossed the land, and the Big Blue River ran through it.

GS Industries executive Rob Cushman wanted to consolidate his operation on the east side of the Blue River. For $30 million, he would fold into a new mill everything Kansas City workers had learned about making grinding balls over their seventy years in the business. Cushman sent engineer Steve Ornduff on a yearlong trek around the world to visit other GS Industries plants and figure out everything everyone else knew about grinding balls, too.

Italian engineers had designed the best unscrambler, which sorted cold steel bars and readied them for softening in a furnace heated to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Chilean steelworkers had made a distributor that rationed orange-hot balls into tubes of cooling water. And an Australian plant offered the best design for those spinning tubes of water.

But the massive twin corkscrews that shaped small balls were all Kansas City. With every turn, the double-helix machine cut and formed two balls. Its 2,500-horsepower motor was more than twice as powerful as anyone else’s.

Kansas City’s was to be the fastest ball-making line in the world. Linked to the end of the rod mill, scrap steel would be melted, poured, rolled into bars and spun into balls with minimum human labor and maximum energy efficiency.

But when workers turned on the machine in September 1996, the first bar jammed the corkscrews and broke the sheer pin linking them to the motor. So did the second one. And the third.

After workers fixed the sheer-pin problem, the 32-foot bars slid through the machine instead of being chopped up into balls — the twin corkscrews mangled these “slider” bars like twist ties, splashing superheated metal around the plant.

It took two weeks to get the one-of-a-kind machine to run right; more weeks passed before the other custom-built pieces worked. But when they did, the result was a thing of beauty.

Operating just five days a week for 45 weeks, the ball maker spun out 140,000 tons of balls in a year.

There wasn’t another plant like it in the world, Ornduff says.

But Ornduff never got to finish his project. Cushman retired, taking management support for the effort with him. Meanwhile, copper and gold mines across the country were being idled, not opened. The steel industry had long since crashed.

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Once the pride of the Northeast — a respectable counterpart to the stockyards on the city’s west side — Kansas City’s steel plant closed its gates in May 2001.

Ornduff and a handful of other Kansas City men, however, weren’t quite ready to say good-bye to their balls.

In 1888, a Pennsylvania industrialist named J.H. Sternbergh built the first bolt-and-nut factory west of the Mississippi River. He situated Sternbergh Bolt and Nut Works on 12 acres along the banks of the winding Big Blue River, halfway between Kansas City and Independence.

Kansas Citian Willard E. Winner, who owned a small rail line linking the two cities, told Sternbergh he could keep the new plant supplied with materials and provide him with a way to ship his products.

Winner eventually signed on as a customer as well — along with Kansas City’s other railroads — all of them buying the iron nuts and bolts made in what was becoming a neighborhood of immigrants. Jimmie Sirginous’ father, for one, moved to the neighborhood to join a dozen other Greek families. Sirginous, now 83, remembers Polish, Mexican and German families, too.

Along with the iron mill, the valley housed other industrial plants offering low-skill jobs that didn’t require strong language skills. The men made plumbing equipment at American Radiator, manufactured tar paper for CertainTeed and welded tanks for gas trucks at Butler Manufacturing.

On their days off, they built small houses for each other on little lots south of Independence Avenue. “It was the American dream,” Sirginous says. “They came over here to better themselves.”

By 1918, Sternbergh Bolt officials were trying to better themselves as well. Convinced they couldn’t survive solely on their iron business, they decided they needed steel.

Steel was nothing new — ironsmiths had been making it more or less accidentally for 2,000 years. Steel is simply iron containing .1 to .8 percent carbon. More carbon makes cast iron, which is brittle. Iron with less than .1 percent carbon is called wrought iron. In the middle and late 1800s, Englishman Henry Bessemer and others had figured out how to fine-tune the amount of carbon and other impurities in iron to consistently make steel. George Cook, the sales manager at Sternbergh Bolt, wanted to bring that technology to Kansas City.

Geography presented a problem, though. Kansas City had no iron mines to provide raw materials. Cook believed workers could make new steel from recycled steel and scrap iron. Shrugging off detractors, workers at the newly named Kansas City Bolt & Nut Company-Sheffield Steel Mills began doing it in 1920.

With its thriving rail industry, Kansas City had a ready supply of scrap iron and steel. Sheffield’s furnaces devoured worn-out rails and decommissioned train engines. Eventually a scrap industry grew to supply the plant with shredded cars and discarded building supplies.

Five years later, a Missouri Portland Cement executive came to the Sheffield plant in search of material to help grind cement. He started buying the holes that workers had punched out of large nuts, according to a history written by former Sheffield employee Herbert Gronemeyer.

By Gronemeyer’s account, workers started experimenting with different shapes, throwing metal cones, steel cylinders and pieces cut from oil-well sucker rods into a 5-foot tumbler. They ran the tumbler night and day, pulverizing broken glass and sand, ultimately figuring out that balls were the best shape for grinding. Sheffield bought its first steel-ball-manufacturing machine in 1926.

Over the next three decades, what was by then Sheffield Steel Corporation continued to add equipment and products — rods and wire, nails, fencing, wire mesh, sheet metal, guardrails — billing itself as a “supermarket for steel products.” In 1930, it became a subsidiary of Armco Steel, based in Middletown, Ohio.

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By then, Sirginous was fishing for catfish in the gooseneck, a spring-fed pond between the railroad tracks on the plant’s property. To his west chugged Missouri Pacific trains; to his east ran their counterparts with the Frisco and Rock Island lines. One of Sirginous’ uncles sat in a shanty all day, signaling to cars and trucks when it was safe to cross onto the lot.

Before the rise of labor unions, employees enjoyed little job security, and Sirginous remembers workers favoring their bosses with gifts. Workers who had small farms would bring in ham or vegetables. Prospective employees kept vigil outside the gate, hoping they’d be invited in.

A similar line later formed outside the Ford plant just south of Independence Avenue on Winchester. It was Ford’s first factory outside of Michigan. Employees there formed a union and, in 1933, went out on strike. They congregated outside, marching in their own daily parade from a park across from the plant down Winchester to Montgomery Ward’s dry goods at St. John and Belmont — now home of the Super Flea — and back. They played craps all over the park, and Sirginous, whose fishing pond had been filled in the year before, found a new pastime.

“I’d get in that dice game, and I’d come home with a pocket full of pennies,” he says. “I was thirteen years old.”

Legend has it that the city police supported the strike until Henry Ford himself threatened to close the plant and move its operations to Omaha.

The steelworkers down the street wouldn’t organize for another decade. By 1939, the plant employed 2,800 people, a number that jumped to 5,600 during World War II, when steelworkers started turning out armor-piercing shot, explosive shells, bolts for jeeps and boats, ammunition boxes, cots and gas cans. They shipped steel to another Kansas City company that built the seagoing landing craft for the Normandy invasion — the boats floated down the Missouri River before heading overseas.

Sirginous was hired after he returned from the war in 1946, getting his job through a friend in the payroll department. He started as an inspector, making 82 cents an hour. He would retire in 1979.

The plant was a meter pounding out the rhythm of the Sheffield neighborhood. People who lived nearby heard its whistle signaling shift changes at 7 a.m., 3 p.m. and 11 p.m.

“On cool winter nights you could hear them stripping ingots like thunder,” says Donnie Box, who grew up in a two-story, two-bedroom house on Sixth Street near Van Brunt. The ingots — 2 tons of molded steel — boomed when workers dropped them onto flat railcars.

As a child of the 1950s, Box remembers “the valley” as busy and blue-collar. His father worked for the railroad and drove trucks. A neighbor, Mr. Brown, drove trucks as well. Mr. Lennon sold insurance. Mr. Williams worked at Ford.

“When I grew up, there were 52 kids living on the block,” Box says.

On snowy days, Box and his friends would stand in the median at Independence and Van Brunt. The bus terminal was a couple of blocks south at Ninth and Van Brunt, and heavy bus tires always turned Van Brunt’s gentle incline into an icy trap. Cars that stopped for the light at Independence couldn’t get going again without a push, which is where Box and his buddies came in.

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“Eight little kids can push a car,” he says.

They’d shove a car, then stick out their hands for quarters. When they had enough money, they’d walk across Independence to a soda fountain and drink up their profits in cherry phosphate.

Box grew up to work at Armco, taking his first job there in 1968 because it paid better than Sears, where he’d been stocking the warehouse at Truman and Cleveland. He started at $2.32 an hour and within three months was up to $2.55, but he didn’t plan to work there long. “I knew I was going to get drafted.”

He got his notice on September 8, 1969, and went on to serve as a mechanic in the Army’s Second Cavalry, spending seventeen months on the Czechoslovakian border. He returned to Kansas City on a Thursday, got drunk with his buddies on Friday and Saturday and went back to work at Armco on Sunday.

Box survived the entry-level rigors of the steel mill, shoveling scrap and cleaning up around roaring machines. “Eighty percent quit within the first month,” Box says of his fellow workers. The survivors folded into the tightly knit, self-contained community. They looked out for one another and did each other personal favors — which they called “government jobs.” A worker would walk into the wood shop and say, “I got a little government job. I need a wheel for my boat.” A welder would repair an auto part. The air-conditioning guys might lend a hand on a home unit. The wood carvers would take time from carving wooden prototypes for steel molds for all sorts of projects.

American-made cars and trucks crowded the neighborhood. Some steelworkers paid $5 a month to park in a row of one-car garages just west of the plant entrance. Outdoor parking cost $2 a month. Others arrived early to claim a good space on a side street or under the Independence Avenue bridge if they were very lucky.

They walked through the busy commercial area along Cambridge and Ewing, sometimes stopping at Max Levinson & Son to buy work gloves, try on new boots and see if any of the store’s appliances were on sale. They’d step into Clarence’s lean-to next door to buy a cigar or a candy bar. They’d grab a cold one at any number of small bars, which always seemed to burn down. Smith’s, the Manhattan Club and Pete’s Place all “had one of them fires,” Box says.

The plant also made for a booming business at May’s, a grocery store at 16th and Bristol. Mike Loges now runs the place as a deli, using the Polish sausage recipe he inherited from his great-grandfather. Loges has replaced the short grocery aisles with tables and a few booths. But the original oak icebox remains, updated to run on freon rather than blocks of frozen water.

Loges remembers how steelworkers wore long-sleeved green shirts over long johns, even in the summer, to protect their arms from sparks, flecks of red-hot steel or splashes of molten metal.

They’d swing by to pick up a couple of dozen sandwiches to take back to their coworkers for lunch or stop after work to order $200 worth of sandwiches and twenty cases of beer. “They decided to have a party,” Loges figures.

They deserved it.

Steel-mill work was nasty — sweltering in the summer and surprisingly cold in the winter. Heat rose through huge baffles in the roof, pulling frigid air in through the walls and freezing anyone more than 20 feet from the furnaces.

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The men filled a giant bowl, 22 feet wide and 10 feet deep, with 170 tons of shredded cars, chunks of metal I beams and rebar. They lowered three electrodes into the bowl and powered them up with an explosion. Lightning between the electrodes heated the scrap to 3,000 degrees, turning it to liquid. The heat incinerated anything thrown inside — which proved useful to area law-enforcement departments. Officers regularly drove armored cars to the plant to dispose of seized guns, bales of counterfeit money or stashes of drugs. Box remembers one especially large load of marijuana that sent a handful of workers to the rafters in hopes of getting a nose hit. Box can personally attest to the futility of doing so.

Workers poured the liquid metal, too bright to look at, into giant ladles and then drained it through water-cooled tubes to make blooms — 30-foot-long slabs of steel 8 inches wide and 8 inches thick that weighed 6,000 pounds each.

The men reheated them, stretching and squeezing them through special rollers again and again until 30 feet became hundreds of feet, then 9 miles of wire. They made bedsprings and tire bead and cable. They fashioned other blooms into circular bars and then cut them into steel grinding balls.

“You can’t make steel by yourself,” says Larry Ludwig, who worked at the plant for thirty years before he retired in 1999 as a general foreman. “You literally are a spoke in the wheel in the manufacturing process.”

Armco required more and more spokes. There was a big hire in 1959, another in 1966 and a third in the early 1970s. By then, the plant was busier and more active than it had been since World War II. Armco swallowed the Ford plant after the assembly line moved to Claycomo. It bought up Vendo, once the world’s biggest vending-machine company, and took over Union Wire Rope, growing to more than 900 acres and reaching across to the west side of the Blue River.

Workers cranked out nearly a million tons of steel a year, making it 24 hours a day and shipping it internationally. “The place was lit up, just vibrating, exciting, someplace you would be proud to take your kid down on a Saturday afternoon and show what’s going on,” recalls Norman Thomas, who was a supervisor.

Armco was once No. 46 on the list of Fortune 500 companies. In 1977, the company built a new melt shop at the Kansas City plant. It was half the size of its primary melt shop — and it was the last big investment Armco made in its Kansas City property.

The steel industry’s rules were changing. With its cheap raw materials, low-cost energy and loose regulations, the United States had dominated the international market for years.

The steel business became a lot tougher in the 1970s, says Robert Brooks, managing editor of Metal Producing and Processing magazine.

Kansas City’s Armco plant found itself competing with emerging minimills — smaller, more efficient manufacturing plants across the country. More competition came from around the world as China and other countries subsidized their own steel industries. Governments can use steel production as a way to provide lots of jobs, knowing that they’ll always be able to export their products, Brooks explains. “The products are generally commodities. They can sit on a dock forever and not lose their value.”

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Armco faced problems caused by the changing industry. It also needed cash. During the 1970s, when times were flush, corporate boss William Verity — who would later become U.S. Secretary of Commerce — pushed diversification as a way to weather the steel industry’s inevitable cycles. He invested Armco’s profits not in steel but in oil, insurance and smaller manufacturing operations. When oil and insurance crashed in the early 1980s, the company foundered. Armco began selling its assets and closing operations that weren’t profitable enough.

In 1983, Kansas City’s Armco plant stopped making nuts and bolts. Four years later, it sold Union Wire Rope and shut down the number one melt shop. Then it phased out roof decking and bar joists.

With the products went the employees. As layoffs and attrition winnowed the workforce from thousands to hundreds, the neighborhood suffered as well. No one replaced the bars that burned down. The commercial district west of the plant became a neighborhood of vacant lots. People had little reason to buy the small, handmade homes nearby. Renters moved into some of them; others were left empty.

Corporate officers eventually ordered Kansas City Plant Manager Cushman to find a buyer for his monster-ball mill and ten others around the world, along with the company’s rod-mill division. He couldn’t — grinding-ball companies weren’t interested in the rod mills, and rod-mill companies didn’t want the ball mills, one-of-a-kind or not.

In 1993, Cushman put together his own investment group and bought the eleven grinding-ball plants, the rod division and the newer part of the plant on the east side of the Blue River himself. He called the new company GS Technologies.

Soon, though, GS Technologies merged with a competitor, South Carolina-based Georgetown Steel. The Georgetown rod mill made the same kind of high-quality wire products made in Kansas City — such as materials for radial tires and piano strings. And this new company, GS Industries, provided grinding balls for half the world market. Cushman dreamed it would do much more.

In 1995, the company spent $60 million to modernize the Kansas City rod plant. The next year, it dumped another $30 million into Steve Ornduff’s ball mill.

But GS Industries made investments away from Kansas City that ultimately hurt the plant’s fortunes, Brooks says. In 1995, the company partnered with Birmingham Steel to build the American Iron Reduction plant in Louisiana. Company officials predicted a boom in scrap-melting operations and a corresponding scramble for direct-reduced iron.

“The plant started up, but the market never evolved. The scrap crunch never really happened,” Brooks says. “Steel tanked.” Thirty companies went bankrupt in a couple of years — including GS Industries.

The corporate crash left the Kansas City workers and managers with nothing to do but point fingers at each other.

Managers blamed the union, which they felt had run up labor costs with antiquated rules that created highly specialized job descriptions. The plant did have an abundance of highly experienced — and, therefore, highly paid — employees. Box, who had been a union officer, knows that in 1997, the average employee had been there 28 years. There were some years when Box took home more than $100,000, his salary laden with overtime.

The union leaders blamed management, which they said lacked consistency and vision. “They had eleven different managers over eight years,” Box says of GS Industries. Each one brought his money-saving ideas, many of which contradicted the money-saving ideas of his predecessor. Box remembers hundreds of Dilbert comic strips posted around the plant.

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“This place was worse than most other places,” Thomas says. “We were really fragmented. It was years of culture that never changed. The employees never trusted management. They didn’t give them any reason to. Management considered other employees as just another piece of equipment out there.”

The company also bore the financial burden of health benefits and pensions for a horde of retirees.

Frustrations boiled over during a three-month strike in 1997. The union members walked out over a contract proposal from the corporation that would have frozen hourly wages and eliminated jobs. Corporate officials insisted that they had to cut costs to stay in business.

Apparently, they were right.

On February 7, 2001, GS Industries announced that it was filing for bankruptcy and closing its Kansas City plant.

Because federal regulations required large employers to give sixty days’ notice for layoffs, the last day for 750 workers at GS Industries would be April 13. When the day came, only 150 people reported to the plant.

Marty Meulendyke had just sent one son off to college and had two more children hard on his heels. He interviewed for jobs in Oregon, Canada, Texas and North Carolina. He got a few offers, but something kept him from taking them.

“What was going to happen here wasn’t resolved,” he says.

The corporate officers had asked Meulendyke and Ornduff to stay on past May to help shut down the plant and keep the ball business running.

GS Industries planned to sell everything, and the corporate bosses knew they could get a better price for a ball business with customers and contracts than they could for a factory full of greasy equipment.

Meulendyke and Ornduff started running the business, buying balls from still-operating GS Industries plants in Chile, Italy, Canada and Mexico and selling them to mining operations in Utah, Nevada and Minnesota. Even without a plant, they were selling 50,000 tons of grinding balls a year — 25 percent of the U.S. grinding-ball business.

GS Industries hung on to its equipment while selling off everything else of value. It shipped parts of the steelmaking operation to the Ukraine, to Oklahoma and to South Carolina. A company called Compass Environmental bought the Kansas City property and began knocking down the buildings and shredding the remaining equipment for scrap.

But Ornduff and Meulendyke wanted to save the grinding-ball business — and not just so that GS Industries could sell it later.

“I thought there was something valuable here,” Meulendyke says. “Ornduff and I worked our asses off to make something salable. If we hadn’t done that, then what would there have been to sell? Just some rusted old equipment.”

Ornduff and Meulendyke proposed giving up the intense and dangerous business of melting and refining steel. Instead, they figured, they could buy premade steel bars, heat them and chop them into balls either at the Kansas City plant or at a sister plant in Utah.

Mark Essig, who was supervising the dying company, didn’t like the Kansas City alternative, fearing it would complicate his efforts to sell the Sheffield property.

“He was trying to kill it,” Meulendyke says. “We kept fighting back.”

Last summer, nine companies considered buying the business through bankruptcy court. They included two companies that made grinding balls in the United States, two Australian grinding-ball businesses and a metal-casting company that sold products to mines.

There was a tenth candidate as well. Meulendyke and Ornduff had been trying to find their own financial backing to make a bid on the company. The two men had opened the Yellow Pages to “Venture Capitalists” and started making calls. It took time, but they kept refining their plan and making presentations until they found some Johnson County moneymen who were willing to take a chance.

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The business was to be sold through a single-bid, sealed auction. Meulendyke and Ornduff put together a $10 million package and held their breath.

“We weren’t going to win the bid against nine guys,” Meulendyke says. As it turned out, there was only one other bidder. On September 10, Meulendyke and Ornduff found out they were in business.

They named the new company American Grinding Systems.

Their first call was to their retired coworker Larry Ludwig. He began recruiting men, assembling a salt-and-pepper-haired clutch of eighteen steelworkers, all but one of whom could brag about his decades of service at the Sheffield plant.

Each had been screwed by the company’s demise.

They’d lost their benefits and seen their pensions shrivel. They’d given up dreaming about taking their grandkids to the plant on a Saturday afternoon to show them where granddad once worked.

They’d never imagined that something so permanent, something so expensive to build and so much a part of the community would ever close.

“If you got through your two years, you just assumed you had a job for life,” says Lynn Hixon, a union millwright.

Hixon had gone back to school to learn the heating-and-air-conditioning business. But it was January, and the 52-year-old was out of work. It didn’t take him any time to say he wanted in.

Ludwig also called Richard Titus, 56, who’d retired from GS Industries but lost his health insurance in the bankruptcy. He was working for American Italian Pasta Company north of the river, and the decision was a little harder. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved in it again,” he says.

But Titus took the job. He wanted another chance to work with guys like Rick Wilson, who had followed his dad into Armco straight out of the Marine Corps in 1968, and Don Shahan and Richard Cecena, who had run the ball machine until it was shut off.

It wasn’t exactly a joyous return.

Their commutes took them past the Compass crews chewing away at Armco’s remnants with backhoes and cranes. It was a little depressing, Hixon says, to “see all these buildings that once employed hundreds of people.”

But the neighborhood showed signs of life. Steelworkers weren’t moving into the old houses, but recent immigrants from Mexico were buying the rental homes and fixing them up. They were opening variety stores and restaurants in some of the storefronts, too.

The “new” steelworkers set about putting their plant back together. Norman Thomas remembers his first tour around the place last December 9.

“It was cold and drizzly,” he says. “There were no lights in the building. Icicles dripped from broken water pipes. It was pretty daunting to look at all that and say, ‘Man, we’ve got to breathe life back into this.'”

It felt as if the plant had been “used up,” Thomas says. “Like if you are going to sell your car in six months, you might not change the oil, figuring you are going to get rid of it. It wasn’t in a shambles, but it was in need of a lot of repair.”

Former union guys sweated side by side with managers to get the plant back up. “We started at the front end of the process and checked and adjusted and tuned and greased and oiled and ran and listened to every piece as we went through the process,” Thomas says.

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They worked the last twenty days in a row, in twelve-hour shifts the last four.

They did it with none of the acrimony that had marked the plant’s final years. Thomas, who is one of the supervisors, dug out the 6 inches of mud and residue from the bottom of the water chiller.

“We are as close to a total, autonomous work group as I’ve ever been around,” he says. “The climate and culture we’re trying to create here is, if you have the expertise and knowledge to do something, you go do it.”

They’ll need that sort of efficiency if their business is going to succeed.

American Grinding Systems isn’t going to run at capacity. In its former life, production ruled all, regardless of how many bearings, motors or employees it chewed up. But the world still doesn’t need that many grinding balls — these guys figure it needs exactly 50,000 tons of grinding balls every year.

First they have to get through St. Patrick’s Day.

They picked this day back in January — before they’d hooked up the hydraulics or signed delivery papers for pallets full of cold steel bars. All they had was a list of chores and their best estimate as to how many hours each one would take.

Every man was committed to hitting this date, Thomas says. “We had talked about it so much, it was a personal challenge at that point.”

By noon on March 17, it’s looking doubtful.

One of the hoses has burst from 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, and milky hydraulic fluid covers the tangle of metal mechanisms that line up the bars and feed them into ball-making rollers.

The arms that sort red-hot bars coming out of the furnace aren’t sorting. Ornduff walks through the cat litter soaking up hydraulic fluid on his way to the underside of the equipment line.

He shines a flashlight at a circular gauge, which indicates that the hoses have all the pressure they need, and mutters, “Well, that doesn’t make sense.”

The sorter was working on Saturday. Everything has worked at least once in the weeks leading up to today.

The unscrambler sorted through a 5-ton bundle of steel bars and ran them to the 65-foot ramp. The furnace fired up, warming by 100 degrees an hour for 20 hours to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The water pumps were working, flushing 30,000 gallons a minute to cool down the machines that move superheated metal. The conveyor belts and cooling racks and quenching drums and tempering ovens all worked, too.

But the crew of American Grinding Systems is discovering that it’s easier to run the pieces one at a time than to crank them up all at once. Another hose bursts. Corrosion in the pipes is clogging up the spray jets that cool the ball machine.

Ornduff turns the air-pressure problem over to contractors from Concorp, Wachter Electric and Sega Engineering, who have been working alongside the American Grinding Systems employees to get the plant started. Like Meulendyke and Ornduff, they are GS Industries refugees. They know the equipment.

Ornduff, Meulendyke and Ludwig cluster on the plant floor at 1:48 p.m. They’ve promised the men they can go home at 7 p.m.

From start to finish, it takes almost three hours to make balls out of a cold bar. It takes a full hour just to heat the bars to 1,900 degrees. Meulendyke wonders how late they can load cold bars into the furnace and still get the men out on time.

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“At what point do you not charge the furnace?” Meulendyke asks.

“Let’s target four o’clock for the first hot bar out,” Ornduff says.

The hard part proves to be getting the cold bars in.

The furnace nears 2,000 degrees. As the first 32-foot bar rolls through a glowing rectangular opening, mechanical arms drop another 781-pound bar on top of it. It takes Meulendyke, Thomas and three others sweating with pry bars to pull it off by hand.

Now their timer is malfunctioning, and the wheels rolling the bars into the furnace are turning more slowly than they did during practice runs.

Six people ought to be able to make balls, relying on a computer system to move the bars and video screens to monitor progress from the “pulpit,” a windowed room in the center of the enormous cavern — with squares of black foam rubber glued to the inside walls to keep out the noise, it’s a climate-controlled island of peace.

But today, the computerized controls aren’t in sync. Rollers inside the furnace stop, leaving a bar halfway in. As four o’clock approaches, the men can’t even start heating the bars. Ludwig suggests loading them using manual controls, but they keep getting stuck halfway in. After they manage to load five bars, the crew gives up.

At 5:34, the sirens sound. One of those bars is ready to come out of the furnace.

It emerges red-hot. The sorter that Ornduff struggled with works perfectly, lifting the glowing metal to line it up with the ball machine. One roller shoves it forward. Another grabs it and spins, splashing molten metal. The machine rams the bar into the teeth of the ball-making corkscrews with an explosion of sound.

Richard Cecena, who runs the ball machine, yells to a man on the other side of the machine. The screws are too far apart, he shouts. The balls are rattling between them. Orange balls are popping out of the top, an eruption of sparks and smoke and orbs. The worker pounds a sledgehammer on the adjustment arms. Cecena leaps to the top of the volcano and looks into its heart.

Then the sounds change. Crunching explosions replaced by a popcornlike noise as grinding balls bang the side of the metal chute. They are bound for the cooling racks and, ultimately, the storage pits. Cecena raises his arms in triumph.

Kansas City is back in the steel business.