The figure shows the manufacturing process for hot rolled and cold rolled coils of strips. A slab about 250mm in thickness is heated in the continuous reheating furnace. After the scale breaker has removed the scale from the surface of the slab, the slab is then hot rolled by a hot strip mill which contains both roughing mills and finishing mills. The roughing mills, which are 2-high or 4-high mills of 2 to 6 stands, carry out either reversing or one-direction rolling. The finishing mills, which are 4-high or 6-high tandem mills of 5 to 7 stands, carry out continuous rolling to the final strip thickness. The thickness of strips rolled on the hot strip mill ranges from 0.8 to 25.4mm, the maximum strip width is 1.3 to 2.2m, and the rolling speed of the final stand is about 1.3 km/min. After hot rolling, hot rolled strips are cooled and coiled. For products other than as-hot rolled strips, scale is removed from the surface of the hot rolled strip in a continuous pickling line, and the hot rolled strip is then cold rolled by a tandem cold rolling mill or a reversing mill. The tandem cold rolling mills, which are 4-high or 6-high mills of 4 to 6 stands, roll strips to a minimum thickness of 0.1mm at a rolling speed of 2.5 km/min. Coils in the as-cold rolled condition become work hardened, so it is necessary to anneal the strip to the required hardness. There are two kinds of annealing: continuous annealing, in which coils are uncoiled and passed continuously through the annealing furnace, and batch annealing, in which coils are stacked and annealed in bell-type furnace. Continuous annealing is now the mainstream practice, since its productivity is much higher, and the heating and cooling rates are much faster and more controllable, and rapid cooling is possible. As the cooling rate is slow in batch annealing, a larger amount of solute carbon in a material precipitates in larger sizes and coils become softer than in continuous annealing. Since yield-point elongation occurs in annealed materials, it is necessary to apply skin pass rolling, which is called temper rolling, to prevent this problem with annealed materials. The manufacturing process for strips achieves the target thickness. At the same time, the properties suited to the application are obtained by controlling the grain size, precipitates, and texture through the hot rolling, cold rolling, and heating and cooling processes. Plates are usually produced by a hot reverse rolling mill, comprising a single stand roughing mill and a single stand finishing mill. Although these rolling mills are basically the same as those used for producing strips, they differ in the following points: (i) they are wider and more powerful; (ii) forward and reverse rotation of the rolls is possible; and (iii) a mechanism for rotating the slab 90 is provided before and after rolling so that products of larger width than the slab width can be produced.