Realise your artistic vision with innovative press plates

The use of stainless steel in sculptures and monuments has become more popular over the last couple of decades. With its sleek and reflective surface, it adds a modern and contemporary touch to any space. The strength and durability of the material also allows artists and designers to explore texture and contrast. For example, polished surfaces can be contrasted against rough elements, creating visual tension. 

But to achieve these artistic visions, the stainless steel must already come with a smooth and clean surface and a mirror-like finish. This is where the expertise of Outokumpu Press Plate comes in. 

“We have been producing press plates in Avesta for more than 30 years,” says Claes Sörebo, Managing Director and Operations Manager for Outokumpu Press Plate AB. “Our products have been sold all over the globe, from Europe and North America to India and China, supplying all of them from the middle of Sweden.” 

Based at Outokumpu’s Avesta production site in Sweden, the business routinely produces plates of martensitic stainless steel that satisfy manufacturers’ exacting standards for producing hardboard and laminate. 

For manufacturers in the hardboard and laminate industries, achieving the right balance between the hardness of steel and the necessary flatness presents a significant challenge. However, Outokumpu stands out with its exclusive hardening process that ensures flatness. This feature is important for the success of high-pressure laminate (HPL) and large low-pressure laminate (LPL) presses.

Using steel from the Avesta mill allows for consistent quality and full traceability in every operation. “Quality is very important,” Sörebo says.

“You need a clean steel, a certain level of hardness, flat plates and you also need a reliable supplier.”

The subsidiary benefits from using resources from the larger Outokumpu, but also has the advantage of being small, agile, and fast. 

As a complement to plates for the laminate and board industry, Outokumpu Press Plate also produces temper rolled coils for use in a wide variety of applications. This includes endless belts to produce fiberboards such as, for example, medium-density fiberboard (MDF).

Achieving an artistic mirror finish

Outokumpu Press Plate has previously worked on projects like the Trinigon 3, a mirror-polished acid-proof steel sculpture by Espen Gangvik which is in Narvik, Norway. The sculpture was originally commissioned by the Norwegian Government back in 1995, to honour the Norwegian liberation from Germany in 1945. Trinigon successfully demonstrates the mirror aesthetic that Gangvik had envisioned yet has stood the test of time, 30 years since its creation. 

Delivering a mirror finish for plates

This mirror-finish look is the result of a unique method including levelling the plates and  then tolerance-grinding. The levelling makes the plates “dead flat” with excellent parallelism which is essential to be able to grind and polish the surface. The tolerance-ground finishing gives the plates a mirror like finish, with a smooth surface free from dents and scratches.

“Tolerance grinding is a lot about quality and details, and every plate when ground needs to be totally flat with no deviations,”

Sörebo says.

“We use a vacuum table that sucks down on the plate and use a tolerance and surface grinder in several steps which makes the surface of the plate smoother.”

“One plate can take hours to make and needs to be turned again and again,” he adds. “It’s not a quick process, it’s dirty and very time-consuming.” When the plate is set onto the table, it must be completely clean. Sörebo says it is a matter of finding the right balance regarding grinding speed and pressure and that you need dedicated and committed operators as it takes time to learn how to grind a plate with good results.

Meeting our customers’ needs through collaboration

The plates’ quality could not be achieved if it were not for the decades of knowledge and experience that have allowed us to gain a better understanding of our customers’ needs. Our end-to-end approach, from melting and rolling to finishing and testing, also ensures high quality according to customer specifications.

Outokumpu Press Plate offers high-quality and sustainable products for niche applications in stainless steel and tailor-made service solutions. A combination of long experience, a unique production facility and the fact that they are a small independent company, with the backing of a global company, allows them to supply high-quality products quickly. 

“One of our strengths is that we have the backup of the large Outokumpu company and the integrated steelworks at Avesta,” says Sörebo.

“If we have a customer that wants to see our quality processes, we can offer that to them – we can take them on a mill tour, including the melt shop and hot rolling mill, and they can look at our certification. We have full traceability throughout the value chain.”

Outokumpu Press Plates’ deep expertise and decades of experience in creating smooth and clean press plates with short lead times opens endless opportunities for creativity in design projects.