Cold Heading Auction/Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Roughly 2 years ago, Cold Heading Company closed their Lee Road, Cleveland facility and since that time the equipment (including their large heat treating department) has been sitting idle collecting dust. Tomorrow Thursday, December 6 everything goes to auction and this includes the heat treat department. This consists of an AFC 1500 pounds/hour mesh belt line, an AFC 2500 pounds/hour cast link belt line, an AFC 4,000 pounds/hour mesh belt line and 2 AFC Endo generators-all mid 1990’s vintage and all seeming complete and in reasonable or good condition. Now if we were betting people at “The Monty” this is what we expect will happen; the 1500 and 2500 pound lines will be sold to a scrap dealer, the endo generators will also be scrapped or go for almost nothing and the largest line, the 4,000 pound/hour line we would guess will either be sold or removed from the auction. AFC, the largest atmosphere furnace builder in North America is known as a premium supplier of continuous lines and generators but the reality is that very few people these days want continuous lines smaller than about 3,000 pounds per hour, cast link belt lines have little appeal these days and newer multi retort generators have largely replaced the older style units such as these. We actually hope we are wrong on these predictions as we hate to see top quality, good equipment scrapped but experience tells us this is what we can expect.