It does not matter what you are trying to make, even with a perfect recipe, the outcome can hardly live up to your expectations if the ingredients are not equally perfect. To get the best you need to go to the best. If you are making things out of steel and you are in Lithuania, you go to SteelTrade.
UAB SteelTrade has been established in 2011 as a successor to the company Melesta. For decades now they have been selling a wide variety of metal products, both wholesale and retail. In their four locations all around Lithuania, 33 000 m2 worth of steel sheets, tubes, beams and bars are waiting to be cut to size and shipped to customers.
Those who need something more go to Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania and its former capital, now an important center of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. There, in SteelTrade’s headquarters, three MicroStep cutting machines help make custom components for the steel importer’s customers.
MicroStep’s OxyCut and PLS product lines’ stories are in a way similar to that of SteelTrade’s predecessor. They have been discontinued for years now but the knowhow and experience gained from their design and operation lives on in modern, state-of-the art machines sold today. Two of these old-timers are still hard at work in the Kaunas workshop. The company that was still known as Melesta at the time acquired an OxyCut 12001.25GG and a PLS 12001.25P in 2007. Both 12 m long and 2.5 m wide, they cut sheet metal with two oxyfuel torches and a high-definition plasma, respectively.
Darijus Lukoševičius, Sales and Project Manager at Serpantinas, sums it up: “Main advantages here are high precision and speed of cutting, and high efficiency thanks to the cutting/drilling combination. Over the years, the client has gained trust in MicroStep.”
When the company started to consider modernizing their cutting capacities, good experience with existing machines came to play a significant role in the decision process. At the end of 2021 SteelTrade reached out to MicroStep’s representative in the Baltics, UAB Serpantinas, with an inquiry for a modern cutting and drilling solution. After a careful analysis of their requirements, they decided on a versatile CombiCut machine with a straight plasma head and a drilling tool station with ACDB for auto-calibration of drill bit geometry. The machine is used to produce parts from mild steel and stainless steel while the drilling capability provides SteelTrade with an efficiency advantage over other Lithuanian steel service centers.
