Hyundai Steel: Where Your Car Comes From
What do you do if you’re a very big Asian car manufacturer and you want to make sure that the steel that goes into your vehicles is top quality. If you’re Hyundai, you buy and/or create your own steel mill. If you drive a Hyundai or are thinking of buying one, you probably don’t really stop to think about where the steel came from before it became a car, but it’s quite fascinating. According to one particular advertisement, Hyundai get very picky indeed about the steel that goes into their cars and have designed the factory in question to make sure that what you get going into the car in question is steel and nothing but steel.
The process starts off with iron ore and coking coal. Ever wondered where the ore from Australia’s mines ends up? Although a good chunk stays in the country and gets used here, the majority of what comes out of our mines ends up in Asia for manufacturing. Some of the iron ends up at the big Hyundai steel plant in South Korea. The coking coal comes from a range of places, with Australia and New Zealand both doing their bit to keep the supply up. The iron ore goes into a blast furnace and is heated to become liquid metal. During this process, from the moment it leaves the boat, the metal stays in a sealed factory section to make sure that absolutely nothing gets into the molten metal – dust and other bits don’t mix with iron very well and can compromise the integrity of the iron/steel and make it weaker than it would be otherwise. Not that people have only just discovered that metal doesn’t mix with mud – this principle is used as a symbol in the Bible (Daniel 2: 41–43). Hyundai is very proud of its closed loop system where even the raw materials are kept in hermetically sealed chambers to keep out contaminants. The tight sealing has another advantage: contaminants can’t get out of, say, the coking furnace. After it comes out from storage, the iron ore goes through the process of sintering or grinding before it goes into the furnace. At the same time, the coal is coked and transported to the blast furnace. The coke is used to heat the blast furnace, and the iron is melted so the pure iron can be purified and the slag extracted. Now the iron is ready to become steel.
World's Weirdest Cars- Have Your Say
Over the century plus of mass car production some real oddities have emerged. We have expressed our thoughts on the World’s Weirdest Production Cars here.
Our list is far from exhaustive so you may agree with some, strongly disagree with others, and have some strikingly odd examples that you think should have been included.
Novated Lease Infographic
A lot of people have asked us to try and put together a simple explanation on what a Novated Lease entails – probably because we rank #1 in Google for the term. So our friends at Prestige Performance Centre were kind enough to put together an infographic for us. Hope you like 🙂
Dream Cars, Concept Cars & Engineering Exercises
The late, great automobile designer at General Motors, Harley Earl, was fond of producing engineering exercises in his GM Design Group. These one-offs were shown in automobile shows to gauge public interest, but also just as often to showoff the talents of Earl’s great design team. A number of these concept cars went on to become production models, though greatly modified for better adaptation to mass production. Some of these one-offs were completely roadworthy vehicles and were driven by Earl and other top GM executives.
Among the dream cars that made it to production are the 1953 Buick Skylark, a sporty, V-8 powered convertible with low-cut doors and racy looks that still are hot today. Raymond Loewy Design Studio produced a show car for Studebaker in 1952 that evolved into one of the best classic designs of all times, the Studebaker Starliner coupe. This car evolved into the Studebaker Hawk series of the late fifties and sixties, but none of these were as beautiful as the original concept car penned by Robert Bourke of Loewy Design.
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