UrBC, Chelyabinsk, July 5, 2017. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) launched its Mill 2350 seventy-five years ago this month; the mill was first used to make vehicle armor during the war times, the company press service reports.

Mill 2350 was made at Uralmash in Yekaterinburg in 1935 and sent to Zaporizhia. In 1941, armored steel was needed badly, so the equipment, as well as its operators and their families, were all evacuated from Mariupol to Magnitogorsk. The mill then consisted of two heating furnaces, two mill stands, a smelting unit, all connected with roller conveyors.

The mill got assembled phenomenally fast and got commissioned as soon as July 1, 1942. From Day 1 in Magnitogorsk, the mill was primarily used to make military goods. The armor was used on gunboats, infantry vehicles, the so-called flying tanks, and attack bombers.

‘This used to be an open-air site during the war, a much smaller one. Mostly, the workers had to cut steel sheets and send them to military production sites. The rest of the assembly line was put up in 1957. Little has changed in the process itself since then: slabs get preheated to 1,280 degrees centigrade and are rolled through two-high mill stands into 37-mm-thick sheets. The entire process is controlled by an operator to make sure we get the necessary parameters,’ says acting head of production site Rodion Zainagabdinov.