The Steel Fabrication Specialists

Mid-City Steel
Written by Ryan Cartner

Mid-City Steel is a full-line steel product supplier with extensive rebar fabrication capabilities operating in New England, with a headquarters location in Westport, Massachusetts and a second location in Bozrah, Connecticut.
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The company has roots spanning back to the mid-1930s, when the founders began working in the scrap metal industry. By 1951 they felt that they had learned enough about scrap metal to take a risk and open their own scrap metal recycling operation that they called Mid City Scrap Company. Over the next two decades they ran this operation out of Westport, MA, and found a great deal of success in the region. In 1976 the ownership of Mid-City Scrap Co. was passed on to a second generation, and under the new leadership the company’s focus shifted toward structural steel supply. Over time it developed an expertise and a reputation for quality products and services, and today the company is well recognized in New England as a premier steel service center.

Presently, Mid-City Steel offers a wide variety of structural steel products for a wide range of applications. Beyond the impressive catalog of products it offers there is also an extensive set of fabrication services to meet the needs of customers with more unique projects.

A key component to the Mid-City Steel offering is steel rebar. Rebar, short for reinforcing bar, is a structural steel product used to reinforce concrete. Concrete is very structurally stable under compressive forces, such as the force of its own weight bearing down such as in the case of a concrete column or wall. This stability enables a concrete construction to be very large and very heavy without breaking under its own weight. The opposite of a compressive force, which pushes the concrete together, is a tensile force, which pulls the concrete apart. Concrete has very weak tensile strength, and this limits its value as a structural building material. Rebar is embedded within the concrete before it sets to improve the structure’s tensile strength. Rebar is thus fundamental to concrete construction, and Mid-City steel is a premier supplier of the product within its operating territory.

The company offers rebar in various sizes and types at competitive price points, and has equipment in-house to shape the material to the customer’s specifications. It is capable of working with rebar sizes from three eighths of an inch, to one and one half inches. It’s available in grade 60, which is a metric that signifies that the rebar has a yield strength of 60 kilopounds per square inch, and in galvanized and stainless steel when needed.

In order to bend and cut the rebar, the company has a line of fabrication equipment from KRB Machinery. The KRB Shear Line is a cutting machine that enables it to automate the process of precisely measuring and shearing the rebar to a specified length. Multiple KRB Form Benders take rebar from a coil and use digital drawings to bend the rebar into precise, uniform shapes. The KRB Table Bender is used to bend rebar of larger sizes up to one and one half inches in diameter. Whatever the customers specification calls for, Mid-City Steel is capable of fabricating structural rebar that suits the project.

Another key product offered by Mid-City Steel is Hardox Steel Wear Plate. Hardox is a company that makes steel plate designed with immense durability, called wear plate, designed to survive in extremely high-wear applications. Three properties combine to make Hardox the most reliable wear plate on the market: strength, hardness, and toughness. When referring to metal, these three properties are distinct. Hardness is a measure of how well the material can stand up to friction; strength is a measure of how much force it takes to deform it; and toughness is a measure of how well it resists fracturing. Hardox wear plate is among the most durable steel plate available in terms of all three of these types of wear. A video on the company website demonstrates this by showing a large Hardox bin being put to the test against sledgehammers, jackhammers, and being thrown down steep hills by a crane. It easily resists scratching, denting, impacts, and more.

Hardox wear plate can be used to build the bodies of trucks and large-scale equipment. The abrasion-resistant properties of the product mean that the required durability can be achieved with less steel, making for equipment with more fuel efficiency. Mid-City Steel is an authorized supplier of Hardox plate; the company recognizes the value in the product and is committed to making it available to its customers.

Beyond these two products, the company keeps stock of every common steel product a customer might need, including steel pipe, plate, beams, hot and cold rolled steel sheets, corrugated roof deck, and much more. Many of these products are available in aluminum, galvanized, and stainless steel as well. Mid-City Steel also has a division dedicated to chain link fencing, and is a member of the American Fence Association, demonstrating that the fence products it offers meet the highest standards of quality. Steel bollards, the vertical steel pipes commonly used to direct traffic in parking areas among many other applications, are another specialty of the company, with both new and surplus materials for this purpose.

Beyond structural and utility products, the company also offers ornamental wrought iron products for aesthetic applications.

Having started its life as one of the largest and most successful scrap metal recycling operations in southern New England, Mid-City Steel has developed a keen sense for tracking down great deals on used and surplus steel products as well. Many projects that require steel components might not require that steel to be new, and in these cases Mid-City Steel has a large inventory of used pipe, plate, beams, angles, large marine chains, and more available for customers to purchase at reduced rates. When a customer is looking for a better price on unused steel, Mid-City also stocks surplus products. Steel mills produce steel at predetermined lengths for sale, but quite often, due to subtle variations in the manufacturing process, steel might be cut slightly too short. In these cases these shorter length cuts of steel can’t be sold as a part of the mill’s regular product, and so is set aside as surplus. Mid City Steel has developed close relationships with mills, and can often purchase surplus steel at a reduced cost, savings that can later be passed onto customers. By offering used and surplus steel, the company is able to offer the best possible pricing to customers with a suitable application.

For fabrication purposes, the company has an assortment of specialty equipment. For shear cutting steel, the company has purchased industrial shearing machines capable of cutting sheet metal as thin as three hundredths of an inch, all the way up to half inch steel plate. Shearing works well for sheet and plate, but when working with steel piping, the compressive force of the shear will deform the circular profile of the material. For cutting steel pipe to various lengths, the company uses a high-end piece of saw cutting equipment called a HYD MECH cutter with a seven and a half horsepower carbide blade capable of working on up to 6000 lbs. of material at a time.

For more complex fabrications, Mid-City Steel has invested in HD plasma cutting tables. This equipment is capable of quickly and accurately cutting complex shapes in two inch thick aluminum, stainless, and carbide steel plate. This equipment, Koike Aronson’s Mastergraph Extreme, can be controlled using an advanced CNC system, enabling customers to provide Mid-City Steel with their own digital drawings for precise custom parts. If the customer doesn’t have a digital drawing, they can provide the company with a sample component and the team will create the drawings from it. In some cases, digital drawings can be made from a customer’s hand-drawn diagrams. Mid City Steel uses specialized proprietary technology from a company called Hypertherm to optimize the plasma cutting process, and to improve the quality of the resulting product.

The high-end fabrication equipment employed at Mid-City Steel represents a substantial capital investment, but one that the company identified early on as a necessary expense in order to meet the needs of its customer base.

For decades, Mid-City Steel has been recognized as a premier steel service center in the New England region. Supplying steel products for any and every application, at competitive prices, the company is committed to serving the New England area today and long into the future.

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