Moving Metal

This Herr-Voss cut-to-length leveling line installed at the Los Angeles division was one of the capital investments Reliance made during the 1980s.

additional flame cutting equipment. Santa Clara and Phoenix each gained one of the new milling saws, which could cut six-inch by twelve-foot plate to a squareness tolerance of +/- .004-inch. Bralco in Pico Rivera got a $200,000 narrow aisle tracking system serviced by a five-ton capacity sideloader. Acquisitions accelerated in the mid-1980s. Reliance bought a steel processing plant in Union City, California, from All Metals, Inc. in April 1985. In July 1986, Reliance bought the assets of Lafayette Metal Service Corporation in Long Beach. Two months later, Reliance acquired Valex Corp. in Ventura, a producer of high-purity stainless steel compo- nents used to build the gas piping systems in semiconductor

Arnold Engineering for more than a $1 million in cash, renamed it Arnold Technologies, Inc., and moved the oper- ation to Anaheim. By then, Reliance was spending about $5 million a year— double its earlier rate—on equipment for the rapidly growing organization, which by then was up to seventeen divisions. Among the investments were three cut-to-length leveling lines and two Acra-Cut milling saws. One of the leveling lines was installed at the Los Angeles division, another in Santa Clara, and the third at the Dallas/Fort Worth division. Tricon received a $400,000 automated storage retrieval system, a saw for bar and structural cutting, a fifth overhead crane, and

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