Ready-Made-Steel in India

Recently ready made steel has been making strides in the construction industry, waiting to take it by storm as RMC did a few years back.

Ready made steel is reinforcement bars cut and bent to required size and shape so that it is only necessary to tie them in place before concrete.

The product is useful on the following grounds:
• Practically, however carefully you order steel from a vendor, the exact number or weight of steel bars do not match to your requirement. So conventional steel purchase always tend to be in excess of exact requirement. This leads to balance after usage.
• When steel is purchased and handed over to craftsmen, there is a tendency to cut the required lengths at random on an as required basis. This leads to un-optimized cutting schedules and results in wastage.
• There is always a lot of wastage or scrap of steel generated at site. Much of these get buried in construction debris and some of them are lost in theft/vandalism. And whatever scrap you recover after fabrication, is worth 25% of its original price.
• The space of steel yard is saved by using RMS and site looks clean of unwanted steel material.

Since RMS providers use top brands of steel and add the service charges for fabrication, RMS appears costlier than steel bent at site. The steel is transported to site with tags showing the bar marks. Note that in most cases, bending radius is specified on the outer dimensions. Sharp bends are not possible for stirrups.

Generally, RMS suppliers provide 8, 10 and 12mm bars cut to shape from coils. This ensures zero percent wastage on these bars. Coils are costlier than straight bars by about 5-10%. Bars more than 12mm in dia or bars cut from bent lengths generate scrap. The RMS suppliers generally use some optimizing routines to find the best cutting schedules. Despite this some scrap is generated – longer pieces are reusable elsewhere, shorter ones are not. Scrap that is not reusable by the company has to be purchased by the client.

Supply is generally of lengths less than 6m, although upto 12m can also be transported on trailers. Straight lengths less than 16mm can be bent to fit 6m length – this cannot be done on already bent bars.
By far the most important limitation of RMS is the necessity of a detailed bar bending schedule to be provided to the vendor. In most construction such schedules are not prepared as part of design. However, irrespective of using RMS or not, it is always advisable to prepare bar banding schedules (BBS) for all steel cutting works.

The position of lapping of steel reinforcement is the most difficult specification of a pre-determined BBS. The lapping requirement results in BBS such that total length of cut pieces is always greater than the total length required by the total length of number of lap splices. There is now an upcoming tendency to replace lap splices with butt splices using couplers.

Threaded couplers require ends of lapped bars too be threaded to accommodate the coupling sleeve. There are also couplers which can be crimped to bar profile at site, or inject filling of space between sleeve and rod. Bars can also be spliced with flanged butt connections. These types have not appeared in the Indian construction market yet. Threading has now appeared as a common splicing method in many major projects.

Even using coupler connections, it is necessary to foresee the staggering of laps at BBS preparation stages itself. Hopefully, RMS manufacturers may come up with automated solutions for preparing comprehensive BBS to tap the large market of middle level construction in the country.