OREANDA-NEWS. December 11, 2007. Installation and commissioning of a new equipment was carried out at Cherepovets plant by Italian wire equipment manufacturer "Team Meccanica" and internal Operational personnel, Severstal-metiz' press service reports. The total amount of money invested in the project was 19 million rubles.

This however is not the first experience of manufacturing spring wire that the Cherepovets plant has; production first began is 1988, with modernization of the equipment taking place in 2002. In the following years, the customer’s quality expectations and volume of demand exceeded the capability and capacity of the equipment which resulted in a proposal for a new drawing line being put forward and agreed in 2006.

Work began in January of 2007 and completed in December 2007 when the first trial load was dispatched to the customers.

Further production and customer trials will be carried out over the next 2 months by Technical personnel; the aim being to achieve the designed capacity of 500 tonnes per month. The new equipment will allow the "Severstal-metiz" Cherepovets plant to increase the production output by 50%, expand the scope of product and customer base and to offer improved quality of the spring wire.

Alexander Shevelev, Managing Director of the Cherepovets plant, commented: "Putting into operation the new spring line at the Cherepovets plant is a successive stage in the implementation of the "Severstal-metiz” strategy, to manufacture high quality products." He added: "The increased capacity allows us to considerably expand our business in Russia and in the future will allow us to better satisfy the increasing requirements of our European clients."