Why Is Steel So Expensive?

[vederstein]

Nuclear Fusion: 20 years into the future and always will be!

 

[RM-MN]

Nuclear Fusion: 20 years into the future and always will be!

We're gaining on the nuclear fusion. It was 50 years in the future 40 years ago.

 

[Entropy455]

A friend from college went on to get his physics degree. While in our third year of school, he told me in-depth about how cows can be represented as simple spheres, and how the mathematical approximation greatly simplified equations, yet still returned very accurate results. I walked over to the trash, grabbed an empty egg carton, and told him I had just built a working model-prototype of a high-efficiency cattle car... He didn't think it was funny. Apparently round cows are serious stuff in physics. . . . .

 

[Rocket Man]

That is a cool little engine did yu b

recently bought 10 pcs. of 1018 CRS, 7"dia. x 1-1/8 thick cut to length(1.065 finished) for 26.00 + TN sales tax. That'll make 5 of the engines in the vid link. These 5 will have 1-3/8 bore(up from 1-9/32) still with .112 cyl. wall thickness.

Cool did you build that at MTSU.

 

[Rocket Man]

I lived in Arizona for 3 yrs it was cheaper to order metal form Nashville TN have it sent to Phoenix AZ by UPS. I bought a lathe and bridgeport mill while in AZ it cost me 3 times more than TN. When I moved back to TN I sold equipment got my money back. Metal cost a lot more in AZ than TN even after paying shipping cost from TN to AZ it I saved money.

 

[goldstar31]

A friend from college went on to get his physics degree. While in our third year of school, he told me in-depth about how cows can be represented as simple spheres, and how the mathematical approximation greatly simplified equations, yet still returned very accurate results. I walked over to the trash, grabbed an empty egg carton, and told him I had just built a working model-prototype of a high-efficiency cattle car... He didn't think it was funny. Apparently round cows are serious stuff in physics. . . . .

'Spherical cows' is a silly joke. Sorry and all that. I expect with all that methane**********************
Have a nice day!

Norm

 

[MRA]

>The US has about 250 million registered cars. About half are daily driven. Assume 1/20th of those are on the road at a time - that's 6,250,000 cars. Assume the average car...

Entropy455 - that's a useful analysis, thanks for taking time to type it up.

In my idle moments I wonder about a strange future (if we can get there peacefully) with hi-tech electric trains delivering stuff to local railheads, picked up by horse and cart. There can't be enough rare-earth materials around for all the batteries and motors needed for electric cars and vans for replacement at current levels of use, let alone the charging requirement. And how many charge cycles are they good for? Toyota Prius has been around long enough to do some googling on that - I'll give it a go.

It's the 'getting there peacefully' which worries me, as much as climate change itself. Cheap stuff in the shops means low crime, my underworld contacts tell me. The Japanese may retain the social discipline necessary to manage times of scarcity. I'm not sure we (UK) do...

 

[Entropy455]

It's actually not a silly joke Norm.

Just as higher order terms are tossed out within talor series expansions, there's an entire field of physics equations that are based on the simple assumption that objects are perfectly round. Take something as simple as steam - the water molecule is not round, and is quite polarized, is it not?

The spherical cow example has been taught widely in physics classes for many years.

 

[Anatol]

Love the spherical cow references Its true, predictions of the behavior of complex systems is almost always unreliable, often wildly wrong. But one side of this conversation that I feel is almost never motioned, but which Cogsy and MRA alluded to, is our expectation of access to energy.

It is sobering to recall the first thing most (80%) people on the planet do in the morning is carry water. We expect is to come out of a faucet. Behind that faucet is a a huge resource consuming infrastructure. LAs water is pumped over the steepest mountains in the hemisphere! Likewise power and transport. Anyone on this forum is already part of the 1% in terms of energy access.

Who ever said it was fine to take a ton of steel with you to get a pint of milk? For most of the history of the human race, available power was your own muscles, maybe that of a donkey or horse. (Unless of course you had slaves). The access to energy we take as normal is a blip on the screen of history. I think about more reasonable energy scenarios, as MRA does, and I worry about the social implications too.

 

[vintagengineer]

Wow! I didn't realise you had mountains higher than Everest!

 

[reubenT]

The bigger business gets the more it runs as a money game. extract the most possible from the consumer while spending the least possible in raw materials and labor. Any bumps in the economy is a good excuse to push prices up, and keep them up as long as possible after the bump, at least until competition pushes them back down. But not infrequently all the business industries in one commodity can get together and agree to not compete, instead hold all their prices up so they can all make more profit. Anyway, I've collected a lot of scrap, steel mostly, some cast, (like tons of it) and got rid of a lot, then collected a lot more, and was recently thinking I needed to get rid of some to reduce the junkyard around the shop. Until I went looking for some pipe fittings. Yikes, prices have gone crazy, out of sight. $150 +/- for just a 3" pipe fitting. That's rediculas. So I decided to go ahead with an attempt at a induction furnace. Turn some of this useless scrap into expensive parts. (or parts that would be expensive if bought) With the advantage of being able to custom make anything I need. All I need is a pattern, make the shape I want as a hollow in green sand and then melt and pour. Oh it's got it's hazards and tricks of the trade. But it's an old trade and all the info is readily available.

"With $1K you can buy an iPhone..." And 100's of thousands of other ways to waste it. But you can also invest small in something that will give return, and then do it again and again and grow to millions. There are so many temptations to spend, and so many people and business around us with their hands out asking for our money, it's very difficult to exercise the self discipline to not spend on anything not critically necessary and invest instead. And those of us who grew up dirt poor and learned the discipline have been successful. But we think we're doing our children a favor by giving them a head start on it. It doesn't work that way. If they don't grow up poor and learn the self discipline like we did they won't know how to handle money in such a way as to gain or even maintain success. That's why so many who win a lottery loose it all quite fast. And I did grow up in a one room cabin without electricity or phone. Got one pair of tenny shoes a year, went barefoot all summer. pumped water from the well with a hand pump. But my parents lived like that in order to live cheap and pay for the property we lived on. Now we have 80 acres in the mountains paid for long ago, and plenty to keep us busy, multiple business opportunities, we've tried several, but my favorite is agriculture under cover so I'm working toward expanding that using several interesting technologies to back it up. My plan will turn it into a very low overhead high profit venture that's fun to work with as well. And since I'm past 50 now I need to think about a "retirement" plan, even though my plan with the greenhouse business will keep me going in health energy and endurance and never need to retire from anything.

 

[goldstar31]

I suppose that it HAD to happen and Beijing has imposed a 25% tax on imports from the USA.
I'm not always dozing off!

The good news- for the Brits is that a traditional fish and chip shop in the North of Leeds is printing its menus in Mandarin. Two bright bits emerge on the Chinese front as I was invited to a Chinese wake last week and sadly couldn't go as I was imbibing large quantities of quite palatable vin rose in the Dordogne. So I've promised my daughter who happens to do orthodontics- North of Leeds a 'carry out' on my impending visit. Hummm? I wonder? Again, I have a close neighbour who is half Chinese and who sells vast quantities of his curries- to chip shops. I suppose that - but more importantly whether he has 'fixed me up' to meet a rather important Chinese financier- in Oban, Scotland-- of all places.

And I think that all this planning, I'm been pressed to go 'State-wise' next year. I doubt with my Muslim and now Chinese connections that it may be an 'opium' pipe dream.


Well, It's different, I'm able to buy Chinese machines with cash, pay an non scrapyard price for metal of unknown quality -- and - go somewhere else for my long holidays.

Oddly, there are model engineers like me. Oh, and I've got a date with a Toyota Prius driver who wants me to co-drive hers into Austria for a sort of 'Sound of Music' sort of thing--- for the umpteenth time. She's rather 'dishy', quite rich and was professor of flute and cor anglaise. Oh, and she has her own solar panels!!!

Good Day to you all

 

[BaronJ]

Hi ReubenT,

I wholly agree with you, particularly your first paragraph.
That is why we do not have any real competition here in the UK between energy companies, Electricity, Gas, etc.

The internet makes it easy for these people to ensure that they make maximum profit. They all want us to switch and save money ! What a con. Try getting something out of them that you can really use to compare prices. No before you get anywhere, you not only have to tell them where you live, but supply other information to confirm that. Then they check their databases and find out who you are with and how much you are paying. Its at this point that you find that your new prices are up lifted from the old ones.

A perfect example is here in the UK we have what is called "Economy 7" for as long as I can remember it has always been half price night rate for 7 hours. All of a sudden economy 7 is now 90% of the day rate. And the public are letting them get away with this robbery.

Let us take the so called standing charges ! They might knock a penny off the day rates, but I'll guarantee that the standing charge has gone up by double that. Not only that but if you have solar, the standing charges are higher still.

Ofgen is doing absolutely nothing to curb this behaviour, a toothless organisation, paid by the taxpayer to be a sop to the minions.

Rant over, I'll get off my soap box now.

 

[Rocket Man]

Change the spherical cow subject lets talk about colonoscopies now it will be, more funner, more better, less worser, more gooder, less badder. LOL

 

[goldstar31]

Change the spherical cow subject lets talk about colonoscopies now it will be, more funner, more better, less worser, more gooder, less badder. LOL

Merde or as the Chinese say 'Ah so!!'

N

 

[deeferdog]

I'm just pleased that the reason steel is so expensive has been explained so clearly.

 

[Cogsy]

But what about cans of coke? I used to be able to get 4 for a dollar at the corner shop and now they're $4 each!! This whole steel pricing is just to distract us from the profit they're making on coke now...

 

[goldstar31]

Coke cans are made from an aluminium 'slug not steel! They are made or were by forcing a hardened mandrel down on them---- did dah, did dah. If the much missed 'Gus' was still around- he worked for Metal Box Co, he confirm.

Sorry but true

Norm

 

[Cogsy]

You somewhat missed the point of my very tongue-in-cheek post Norm, and just for the record, I was not claiming coke cans were steel (although they used to be when I was a lad).

 

[goldstar31]

Cogsy

Full marks. I did miss it. We did have a coking plant which was laughingly called 'Dante's Inferno'.

And for my 'bit' about 'Hokey Kokey' in HK? Better not for fear of being 'blackballed'. Then I got another invite HK and onto Fiji. Too much cava and lost a brand-new suit.

Best wishes

N