When Siemens acquired the Morgan Construction Company based in Worcester, Massachusetts (USA) in 2008, it gained not only one of the world’s leading manufacturers in the field of rolling mill technology, but was also able to welcome Senior Vice President Shore and his virtually encyclopedic knowledge of rolling mills on board. Born in the English town of Wickersley, South Yorkshire in 1937, Shore, like many other youths his age, had exactly two careers to choose from when he was growing up: a job in a coal mine or in a steel rolling mill. Shore decided to join the British Iron & Steel Research Association as a mechanical engineer in 1954 while at the same time studying the design of rolling mills at Rotherham Technical College.

In the fall of 1960 Shore joined the Morgan Construction Company, an American firm with a European office in Manchester. From there on, it was one foreign assignment after another. Shore commissioned more than 50 Morgan-supplied rolling mills around the globe, working incessantly on improvements as he did so. Rolling mills are gigantic and very complex plants for the production of bars and rods of steel and other metals. The starting products are blocks or billets. The material is deformed between rolls until it has assumed the desired shape. The rolls are mounted in large stands. The smaller the finished product, the more stands the rolling mill requires. Rods are used for the manufacture of many products from simple nails, bolts, valve springs, and tire cord, to ball bearing steels and nickel based alloy steels.  Shore was constantly trying to improve the productivity of the rolling mills by either accelerating processes or optimizing them so as to enhance the quality of the products and thus make certain post-processing steps superfluous.

In 1988 Morgan finally managed to persuade Shore to move with his wife, Brenda, and his son, Mark, who by then was also working for the company, from Cheshire in rural England to Worcester, Massachusetts. As Senior Engineer in Worcester, Shore drew on his extensive experience in the setting up of new rolling mills to pursue his new developments more intensely than ever before.

One of his most recent and at the same time most important inventions is the Morshor system, which substantially boosts the production of small-diameter rods. The problem when making rods, is the different speeds at which the steel can be processed through  the various production stations of the rolling mill. A high-capacity single strand rod mill is often designed to produce 150 tons per hour (tph). For example, a 12.5 mm diameter rod can readily be produced at 150 tph, whereas a 5.5 mm rod, while it can roll at a maximum speed of 110 to 120 meters per second (equivalent to 400 km per hour), can only be produced at half that tonnage rate, or 75 tph. How could a mill produce smaller sizes at a higher tonnage rate?

Shore wondered how production in the finishing section could be accelerated and came up with the idea of installing two drum-shaped pieces of equipment that serve as intermediate storage, which he called Morshor maximizers, downstream of the intermediate rolling mill. This allows smaller-diameter rods to be produced for further rolling via the two intermediate Morshor storage units and two finishing mills at a correspondingly lower tonnage rate, while larger-diameter rods can be rolled in a single line at the higher tonnage rate of 150 tons per hour, but at a slower speed. These larger sizes can be rolled for further processing directly from the intermediate mill to the finishing mill in which the steel products will be rolled down to the size desired.

Shore’s invention of the reducing/sizing mill was a milestone for the improvement of productivity, quality, and efficiency. More than 60 such rolling plants have already been installed worldwide. Shore has used his expertise to make this type of rolling mill one of the most highly developed of its kind. The reducing/sizing mill boosts the production of all rod sizes by as much as 60 percent because it boosts efficiency and also works very precisely. One of the features of the reducing/sizing mill is it allows the rolling processes to occur at very low temperatures. The surfaces of the rods are so smooth as a result that several steps commonly included in the finishing process are eliminated.

Shore has used numerous other inventions to simplify work processes in rolling mills. The Modular No-Twist Mill, for example, allows the pass shapes (calibers) that determine the diameter of the rods to be exchanged in just five minutes. Calibers are the circumferential grooves in the rolls that together with the grooves in the mating roll determine the diameter of the rod. Because of his vast experience with rolling mills, for each of his inventions Shore precisely coordinated the exact arrangement of thousands of plant components and used sophisticated automation systems to compute the values for the speed of the various rolling processes in order to optimize the gigantic plants for the production of rods and wires specified down to the millimeter. The 613 granted individual patents, 43 invention applications, and nearly 45 IPR families demonstrate Shore's tireless efforts to improve rolling mills.

Much to the chagrin of his wife, Shore isn't even close to contemplating retirement. He is currently working on new methods for increasing the speed of stainless steel rolling mills. Despite his frequent travels – in his younger years Shore was on the road as many as 300 days a year – the inventor still found time for many hobbies. He remodeled his cottage in England himself and has put up a gigantic model railroad in the garage. Shore also loves antique cars. A bright red 1955 Jaguar KX1 40 is his pride and joy.