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Steel vendors jacking up their rates

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cgrim3

Cast Iron
Joined
Dec 4, 2020
Location
Baltimore
Hi all,

I am not sure if this is the correct PM forum to post this to, but here it goes.

At our shop, we mostly work with 316SS and 303SS. Some inconel, titanium 6al4v, aluminum, and carbon steel.

We buy our stainless from Penn Stainless Products and their prices seem to be pretty good. They have a huge selection and we like them.

For titanium, we buy from President Titanium. Their prices are pretty competitive and are usually neck and neck with the other big titanium supplier, TMS titanium.

Inconel is provided by our customer

However, for carbon steel, aluminum, and brass, we usually get quotes from two different places: Copper and Brass sales (Division of Thyssen Krupp) and Alro Steel. We do look in McMaster Carr to compare.

However, Thyssen Krupp and Alro have really been jacking their rates. For example, for some aluminum, Alro wanted 500 dollars (shipping included) while Thyssen Krupp wanted 600 dollars (shipping included). We do know if you buy a section of the bar, they charge you for the entire thing but still....that's pretty high.

After browsing Practical Machinist, I come to read that Xometry (the headquarters is 15 min from my house here in MD) also sells material and their prices are pretty good. I use their online quoting system for material and their price comes out to $271.90 for the aluminum stock!!! I couldn't believe it. I will bet they are using foreign steel, but still (regardless I would still like to buy American steel)! As an aside, we refuse to do work for Xometry because I think they are bad for the industry (driving machining prices down and making the trade harder for everybody else to make a living in) but that's another topic all together.

Have you all noticed a surge in your material costs too? (I guess because of COVID & Joe Buyed-In)

Any of you buy material from Xometry? Where do you all buy material for cheap besides craigslist and ebay?

Thanks,

Chris
 
You have not seen anything like what is coming next, with all the gov spending, and being buddies with china again Inflation will be out of sight. The scrap markets have jumped 30% because of the election. The only way to stabilize the economy is inflation...Phil
 
Lots of speculation taking place about "pent up demand" bs. Lots of commodities futures are up. Some actual supply issues too. Then there's all the new $$$ printed and people/companies loading up on all the free debt they can get before the whole sham goes to hell.
It's all going up, I've been stocking up(or trying to) on carbide endmills and inserts that I use the most, some of which are having shortages and I think there will be more of that for a while, or the need to find new alternatives to get by.
Just last week I got rid of 316 turnings and got the highest price I've ever gotten which would be about $.48/USD.
 
I just got rid of close to three tons of solid 1018 steel blanks, drops and bar ends that have been piling up for the last 3-5 years. Last year I could not get the scrap guy to just take it away without paying the truck fee, $130.00 Last week we got .01/pound.

I have 260 pieces of Brass 3-1/2 round 3/8 wide, these were the left over holding blank after a 2.00 long part was machined complete and then cut off. They weigh about 4Lbs each and we got quoted $1.91 each

Aluminum Solid drops bar ends and scrap $0.43/Lb
300 Series Solid drops bar ends and scrap $0.35/Lb

Scrap prices are the highest we have seen in a long time.

Make Chips Boys !

Ron
 
I get a fair amount of material from Alro. Them like most places, you only get good pricing when you get several thousands of pounds at a time. I just got about 6000ish lbs from them last Friday and there was no increase.

Even when I only need a small amount of something I buy a reasonable quantity even if it costs more than the job. I consider it investing in myself and in the long run it pays way more than buying little scraps all the time. I'll gladly sit on material for years to get it at 1/3 of the cost. It doesn't hurt having a nice inventory.

I've gotten a lot of rush jobs that I quoted 3-10 times the cost of other shops simply cause I had the material on the rack and could deliver before they could even get stock. I've also sold material to other shops on the weekend for pretty much the profit I would have made had I got the job.

I keep everything clearly labeled and maintain digital copies of all the MTRs

And yes I have material like Titanium, Inco, Hastelloy
 
Im no big buyer these days but my old company was buying steel from ASTM by the truckload for cheap, but that was 2014 or so and their material costs have gotten pretttttty high recently.

Typically im getting small batches from McMaster but that is artificially expensive because of convenience and speed of delivery. Also it's not bulk. Their prices "feel" higher than before but I don't run the books on my expenses, I just spend the money so I'm not paying that much attention to price. I can't imagine that things havent gotten pricier in the past 12+ months with all that is going on. There have been reports of raw material shortages throughout almost all sectors of the economy. Eventually I fear carbide is going to be in trouble because the mines are in China and if they control the source....well yea.

Anyone have some scrap carbide spot pricing? Ive been holding onto to a bit of scrap and maybe now is the time to unload it?
 
Where do you guys buy your titanium from? We buy from president titanium and we get our stainless from Penn stainless. All their prices seem to be pretty good.

At our shop we have a ton of carbide to get rid of too and a bunch of inconel 625 to scrap out as well. Our main customer buys our inconel forgings for us though so there is no problem there, except the forgings being tough as nails.

We've heard good things about Pennsylvania steel company so I think we are going to try them next. Its not that big of a deal...most of our work is titanium and stainless and the vendors we use for that have good prices. For aluminum, we are going to start buying from xometey. We are a 2 man shop...the absolute most material we buy at a time is generally 1500 to 2000 lbs. We try to keep mostly round stock on the shelf (since most of our work is lathe work). We do not stock titanium though...we buy that as needed.
 
cgrim3 said:
Has anybody else been getting really high prices for material from Thyssen Krupp and Alro?

Chris
Click to expand...

Dunno................I brought in 4k lbs of 303 from Thyssen Krupp maybe 2 weeks ago. Has it jumped much since then? They had the best prices from my pool of vendors here in MN. It was for a job I run about 2x a year and SS was up a good 30¢/lb from August 2020..........but everything is up.........6061 is up prolly 30-40¢/lb from October.
 
metalmadness said:
...? Ive been holding onto to a bit of scrap (carbide) and maybe now is the time to unload it?
Click to expand...
I'd have to go with no but place your bets. I'm storing not only hard scrap but carbide grinding sludge.
China has much excess capacity on ore and now processed so scrap prices are not good. Some say there are production limits in effect to hold the current price level.
Ah for the days of $20 per pound.
Bob
 
We've got a few local outfits here with good pricing. Howard Precision Metals is unbeatable for aluminum around here. But, prices have gone up about $0.30/lb. since last summer on 6061 extrusion.

Speedy Metals is a nice place for me to get small amounts of material since they don't charge for saw cutting. Just don't buy off their website. You need to call and get set up with an account (doesn't need to be terms) and then you'll get a sales rep who will quote you material way cheaper than their website pricing.

For larger chunks I'll get quotes from a guy at Alro. They are actually very reasonable for saw cut plate 4140 Decarb-Free based on a few products I just quoted. Usually I scoff at their pricing so take it FWIW.
 
I remember one time we got a quote from alro for water jetting a block of carbon steel out for us (the shape was like a pillow block for a bearing, overall dimension were 8 x 12 x 4 or something like that), and they wanted over 2300 dollars! We called them up and asked them what the hell is going on? They said they resort to the slowest water jet cutting speed possible when quoting for waterjet. We told them to bump up the speed, and they came back with a quote for like 700 dollars. Needless to say, we didn't use them for the job.
 
Milland said:
That still seems low(ish). I remember $8 from a few years ago (but don't hold me to how many years).
Click to expand...

a few weeks ago carbide was 8-9/lb. a 5 gal bucket of inserts is a nice 1000 bucks roughly. I dont think my swiss guy got much for his carbide cause his eyes lit up. They have almost 40 swiss machines. I guess they run through lots of inserts.
 
cgrim3 said:
Hi all,

I am not sure if this is the correct PM forum to post this to, but here it goes.

At our shop, we mostly work with 316SS and 303SS. Some inconel, titanium 6al4v, aluminum, and carbon steel.

We buy our stainless from Penn Stainless Products and their prices seem to be pretty good. They have a huge selection and we like them.

For titanium, we buy from President Titanium. Their prices are pretty competitive and are usually neck and neck with the other big titanium supplier, TMS titanium.

Inconel is provided by our customer

However, for carbon steel, aluminum, and brass, we usually get quotes from two different places: Copper and Brass sales (Division of Thyssen Krupp) and Alro Steel. We do look in McMaster Carr to compare.

However, Thyssen Krupp and Alro have really been jacking their rates. For example, for some aluminum, Alro wanted 500 dollars (shipping included) while Thyssen Krupp wanted 600 dollars (shipping included). We do know if you buy a section of the bar, they charge you for the entire thing but still....that's pretty high.

After browsing Practical Machinist, I come to read that Xometry (the headquarters is 15 min from my house here in MD) also sells material and their prices are pretty good. I use their online quoting system for material and their price comes out to $271.90 for the aluminum stock!!! I couldn't believe it. I will bet they are using foreign steel, but still (regardless I would still like to buy American steel)! As an aside, we refuse to do work for Xometry because I think they are bad for the industry (driving machining prices down and making the trade harder for everybody else to make a living in) but that's another topic all together.

Have you all noticed a surge in your material costs too? (I guess because of COVID & Joe Buyed-In)

Any of you buy material from Xometry? Where do you all buy material for cheap besides craigslist and ebay?

Thanks,

Chris
Click to expand...

There was a recent article about the cost of steel and other materials going up as steel has gone up about 2.5 times from july due to shortages. last I checked it went from $350 a tonne up to 1135 a ton.
 
Yeah we got a quote for aluminium from yarde metals too and they were 700 dollars. We also reached out to Howard Precision Metals for aluminum and they were 450 dollars, which is not too bad. But Xometry....with shipping and tax was 300 dollars! And that is without our tax exemption too. I don't know how they are able to price themselves so low. And saw cutting is free too. The only thing is, they don't have good selection other than aluminum really
 
cgrim3 said:
Yeah we got a quote for aluminium from yarde metals too and they were 700 dollars. We also reached out to Howard Precision Metals for aluminum and they were 450 dollars, which is not too bad. But Xometry....with shipping and tax was 300 dollars! And that is without our tax exemption too. I don't know how they are able to price themselves so low. And saw cutting is free too. The only thing is, they don't have good selection other than aluminum really
Click to expand...

Who are Xometry's backers? Are they willing to dump money in to build branding and dependency? Will there be a switch were material is available only if a member of X and there's a tie-in to X's work?

Won't be the first time a predatory method is used to damage competitors...
 
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