【History of Haichuan Pipes】Lanlian Machinery Factory produced seamless elbows in 1957

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In early 1956, China’s first oil refinery – the Lanzhou Oil Refinery – was still in the planning stage. To meet the needs of the project, a machinery processing plant was established by the preparatory committee for the Lanzhou Oil Refinery. During the construction of the Lanzhou Refinery, the machining plant addressed many urgent needs and made outstanding contributions; it itself became part of the \"eldest son of the Republic\", growing alongside the development of the Lanzhou Refinery. At the end of 1957, the construction site of the Lanzhou Refinery was in urgent need of pipe connection elbows, and the machinery factory, which was less than two years old at the time, took on this important task. Steel plate pressing, bending, welding... Despite trying every possible method, the prototype products still did not meet the standards. There’s no time to feel discouraged; we must work together to overcome the challenges. Fitter Xing Shuchun took a different approach: by heating seamless steel tubes and then bending them under pressure, he produced qualified seamless bent tubes that met the requirements for the construction of Lanzhou Refinery. In 1959, Lanlian, which had just started operating, faced new challenges, and the Ministry of Petroleum assigned the task of producing alloy steel elbows and bends to machinery factories. Within just one year, chromium 5 molybdenum and chromium 2 molybdenum alloy steels were successfully produced, and qualified alloy steel elbows and bends were cast, filling a gap in domestic production. Subsequently, the Ministry of Petroleum assigned the task of manufacturing the alloys for these heating furnaces to machinery factories; as a result, chromium-25 nickel-12 alloy steel was produced. Over the following 30 years, various components for heating furnaces such as alloy elbows, bent pipes, hangers, and tube sheets were developed and supplied to refineries across the country.