Lifting and handling equipment for integrated steel producers.

Steel is the sector that shaped Somers Handling’s engineering DNA. Primary steel production puts a combination of mass, temperature, dust, radiation and duty-cycle demand on lifting equipment that no other industry matches — and gets no less forgiving as stock moves from continuous casting through rolling and on to the service centre.

Where Somers equipment is specified

Somers Handling has supplied heavy-duty lifting equipment into integrated steel producers including ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India, specialist-steel mills in Sweden, and UK service-centre and rolling-mill operations. Equipment types span the full steel-handling envelope:

• Motorised duplex slab tongs up to 85 tonnes SWL, rated for slab stacks up to 780 mm thick at surface temperatures up to 1,000 °C.
• Gravity-actuated scissor tongs for hot-line slab handling where mechanical simplicity and low maintenance overhead win over the flexibility of motorised actuation.
• C-hooks, coil tongs (OD and ID) and sheet grabs for rolling-mill entry and service-centre handling.
• Hydraulic billet tongs for specialist-steel producers handling hot billets as direct replacements for long-serving Somers-built predecessors.

Engineering priorities

The common thread across steel-sector work:

• Designing for the worst case, not the nominal. An 85-tonne stacked hot slab at 1,000 °C governs the structural and thermal design, not the median load.
• Radiant-heat management. Loads that never actually touch the lifter still heat it up. Structural members, actuators and control systems all have to tolerate radiant loading through the duty cycle.
• Tare weight optimisation. Every kilogram of lifter eats into usable crane payload. Heavy-duty slab tongs are sized for the full load envelope while keeping tare weight as low as structural integrity allows.
• Duty-cycle reality. Steel mills run continuously. Equipment is sized for the duty class it will actually see — not a conservative “general industrial” envelope that leaves the operator to discover the real limit.

Complementary services

Steel-sector customers typically bundle initial supply with ongoing LOLER thorough examinations and planned servicing so statutory compliance and equipment longevity are managed together.