Summer 2002 marks another milestone for one of the precast industry's oldest operators. Molin Concrete Products kicked off the season by opening a 38,000-sq.-ft. plant housing six 400-ft. prestressed hollow core casting beds. The facility is dedicated to 4-ft. floor plank and augments the 2-ft. Flexicore product the company has offered for more than 40 years. In contrast to the licensed, wet cast Flexicore, the wider plank is the product of PCE Elematic hollow core extrusion technology. The latest addition to Molin Concrete's 55-acre Lino Lakes, Minn., property brings the company's total architectural and structural product fabrication under roof to more than 100,000 sq. ft.

“On some [Flexicore] plank orders, we were looking at lead times exceeding 20 weeks. The upper Midwest is a strong market for hollow core and capacity has not kept pace. We have doubled our plank production and expanded capabilities to bring us into larger projects,” notes Tom Molin, president and great grandson of John G. Molin, who founded the company in 1897. He and three cousins are principals and comprise a fourth generation management team.

“Our two types of hollow core plank can be specified together to make us very competitive in many special projects,” says Dan Molin, vice president, with primary responsibilities in sales and marketing. The company will become the first North American producer to fabricate hollow core in a 16-in.-deep profile, he adds, enabling floor or roof spans up to 60 ft. versus the 40-ft. length to which 12-in. deep product is normally limited.

The inaugural 16-in. product contract is a four-level apartment building in Shakopee, Minn., a town, like Lino Lakes, on the periphery of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Dan Molin notes that an abundance of good hollow core candidate construction — multi-family dwellings, senior or assisted-living housing and low-rise office buildings — is a sure bet for the near and long term. “The Twin Cities is like an island in the middle of the plains,” he says. “People who have spent their working lives here tend to remain year-round in retirement. At the same time, land use restrictions in many towns around Minneapolis and St. Paul are limiting the amount of single-family homes that can be built. This encourages development of more dense, multi-unit dwellings under limited zoning.”

FIRST MOVER TRADITION

The pursuit of deeper, longer spanning floor plank is consistent with Molin Concrete's previous strategy in prestressed hollow core. In 1970, after casting narrow floor plank with conventional reinforcement and early generation prestressing techniques, the company became the first Flexicore licensee to move to the more advanced 60-ft.-long, self-stressing bed method still in use. Tracing their history in hollow core, company officials can see daily floor plank logs grow from 2,000 sq. ft. in the 1950s; to 10,000 sq. ft. in the 1980-90s; to the current 22,000-plus sq.-ft. level.

The new facility is highly automated and has output per man hour upwards of 100 sq. ft. In addition to the 16-in.-deep product capability — owing to the inclusion of a third extruder nozzle in the equipment package — Molin Concrete elected to build the plant around a product handling system combining a transport wagon and gantry crane with clamp hoist. Similar to heavy-duty, engineered dollies, the steel-wheeled wagons travel on rail winches from an alley running the length of the 400-ft. beds to an outside transfer area for sorting by the gantry crane. The transport wagons can haul product stacked up to six planks deep.

Along with a finished product handling system, Molin Concrete furnished the plant with automated mix delivery and maintenance mechanisms. The company is also an early adopter of the EliPlan software PCE Elematic has developed around precast operations. Company officials note that the program automates production planning, scheduling, storage and shipping, thus providing management with a view of week-by-week demand versus capacity, production status of all approved jobs, and the ability to be more accurate when communicating current job status, lead times, delivery schedules and product location.

The new facility joins two established plants — the Flexicore and an architectural/structural line — at Molin Concrete's 55-acre base in Lino Lakes, located about 20 miles north of the Twin Cities. Using wall product from the architectural plant, contractor Adolfson & Peterson Construction built the new enclosure and casting line over a mild 2002 winter.

If perpetually long lead times on hollow core plank weren't enough to justify the investment in the 38,000 sq. ft. plant, Molin Concrete could take comfort in a local demographic dynamic: With a growing retirement population not always keen on Florida, Texas or Arizona, the Minneapolis-St. Paul area is positioned for stable or better construction cycles. Of major population centers (1 million-plus) bordering or east of the Mississippi River, the Twin Cities is the country's most isolated.