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7050 T7651 Bought at Auction - Any Ideas of Value?

mlofgren

Plastic
Joined
Aug 22, 2019
Hello.

I am starting a very small, one-man garage shop with a Haas TL-2 lathe (new) and Haas TM-1P (2010 - purchased from an add on this site). I just purchased a LOT (as in a large amount) of 7075 T7651 Aluminum Bars - 11' x 6" diameter. 8 each totaling 1,700 pounds. I was in the aerospace/defense industry for many years and used 7070/7050 and of course 6061 material daily. I tried to get some idea of what to bid on this material would be on the open market, but never received any quotes back before the auction ended.

My winning bid was $3,160 and have a shipping quote for $700. Yeah, obviously not going to chuck that up in my TL-2, but thought the price was worth the risk. I'll have enough aluminum to last at least through my learning stages :)

Any thoughts on whether this was a "good deal" or not? I was going to just get a hundred pounds or so to play around with initially, but this came up at the last minute and I had to make a pretty snap decision without doing a whole lot of due diligence. And for me, that was a sizable risk...

Thanks for sharing any thoughts!
MattAluminum Rods 2.jpgAluminum Rods.jpg
 
Scrap? Any serious end user business use would need pedigree on paper for heat number(s). You have a large amount of "play with" aluminum bar

Definitely agree. What is the country of origin? If it isn't stamped right on the outside that is a bad sign.
 
To start with I think you should check your math, because your weight figures don't tally for me

This calculator Materials Weight Calculator says 366.5lbs per 11' bar of 6''

Same here so he got more than he thought. $1.08 pound for 7075? I don't buy large quantities of 7075, but when I did I seem to recall it costing 50-75% more than 6061, but that was a dozen years ago. For that price of a little over $1 a pound I smell a rat. I think an auctioneer would have an insider buy it before it went that cheap if it was good traceable material.

P.S. Now I am confused, is it 7050 or 7075, both have been listed.
 
Same here so he got more than he thought. $1.08 pound for 7075? I don't buy large quantities of 7075, but when I did I seem to recall it costing 50-75% more than 6061, but that was a dozen years ago. For that price of a little over $1 a pound I smell a rat. I think an auctioneer would have an insider buy it before it went that cheap if it was good traceable material.

P.S. Now I am confused, is it 7050 or 7075, both have been listed.

(my bold)

There's the rub Dualkit, either the OP doesn't know what he's doing (he'd have mentioned certs) or there's no paperwork, .and no paperwork = scrap
 
It comes from a US Government auction and it does have material certs (though they were not shown in the two pictures they posted during the auction). It was very late last night when I posted - my wife is terminally ill, so I tend to get some respite time for myself between midnight and 3am.

I zoomed the picture up as far as possible. And yes, it looks like they are 4.25 and not 6" diameter. I was just going off the post listing.

Here are the numbers as best as I can make them out: VAC 4.25 R REV N/C 76***051-1 7050 T76511 AMS 4340 REV ***1715732 The asterisks are numbers I could not read due to the straps securing the bars.

Does that help??

Thanks again! - Matt
 
You could put a bar on Ebay with readable scans of the "certs" showing they matched the heat number readable photos on the bar - and see if anyone is interested

Supposing a buyer, you then have a shipping problem:D
 
I guess now, it's worth what you paid for it.

End of the day, you are going to have to come up with stuff to make with it that will make it profitable. And you now have some go-to material that you will be tripping over forever, that you can use for making fixtures and jigs when you need.

Know anyone whose kids are racing dirt bikes? Stuff like "Billet" gas caps and such things seem to sell OK.

I'm sure there are other possible products.

Check the prices that the online metals guys are charging out for short cuts (not full stick qty) and list some on eBay, is one way to part with some of it.

If you have any artistic pretensions, make artistic things and give them as gifts or desktop 'business cards'. I made a batch of fairly simple machinists cubes, that turned out to be one of the more sought after goodies I made, given that they were pretty much just an exercise in fixturing and doing reasonably accurate work.
 
That was a bad decision.

That material is worth about 25 cents a pound if it's near enough for an easy pickup and they will load it into your truck. $500 would have been a fair bid. You got hosed.
 
That was a bad decision.

That material is worth about 25 cents a pound if it's near enough for an easy pickup and they will load it into your truck. $500 would have been a fair bid. You got hosed.

Solid clean scrap aluminum goes for $.22 around here. The stuff was double that before the tariffs hit.
 
I wouldn't say you got screwed but I wouldn't call it a crazy deal either. I routinely get "mill overrun" 7075 for less than you paid not counting your freight, but go look at what a small piece costs to buy! MTRs are great but depending on your customer they will likely mean nothing. I always ask for MTRs when I can but rarely need to produce them. 99 times out of 100 someone that needs "certified" material will not be shopping the second hand market.

If its 4.5" my rough math, figuring .1 pound per cubic inch comes in at 1500ish pounds. Keep it, use it or sell it in small lots on ebay but don't expect to make any money selling it all in one wack.
 
After shipping, you are at approximately $2.35 a pound.

As for the alloy, I've never seen a print that required it. McMaster
Carr and Online Metals don't carry it, so you've got yourself an odd
duck.

As for temper, I know that a T76511 in 7075 can only be had in little odd shaped
extrusions. (Don't ask how I found that out, lets just say the machining
of the parts took less time than *trying* to find the material, turned out
there was a modification in the contract that my customer failed to tell
me about)..

Looking real quick here, there aren't a lot of tempers available for 7050, and
T76511 is identical to T76510.



My guess, a job came through that some dip shit engineer spec'd a whacked
out material spec, and some body had a mill run done, and this is left over
from the 2000lb minimum.

And as others have said, you need the paper on it to make it worth anything.

Though even if you have the paper on it, who is going to need it?

You can still sell it here or on e-bay. I've gotten in a pinch and sold a
bunch of material here and on E-bay (years ago). The home shop Harrys love
a flat rate box full of random drops. Paid the bills for a few months. Granted,
I was only getting about 25 cents a pound for a fat box of drops, but it was
better than nothing, and it paid better than the scrap man.


Like you said.. Play with it. Learn. And then as others have said, come up
with something stupid to make, and sell it. Giant aluminum dildo sculptures or
"billet, mil spec, aircraft grade" Tonka Truck rims. (don't laugh, I started, but
never finished, a set of aluminum rims for a Tonka Winnebago years ago._
 
Is it 7050 or 7075? The thread title does not match the body of the OP's first post, and to me looking at the pic it looks like 7050 is printed on the bars.
 
I've seen that spec (7075 T76511) on a part I make for a helicopter hard point.

I was unable to source it, so the customer provided the material for me on those parts. It was 4" rod- still have a couple chinks on the shelf.

edit: correction- I just looked at the drawing, it calls out 7075 T73511 with an alternate 7075 T6511.
 
Solid clean scrap aluminum goes for $.22 around here. The stuff was double that before the tariffs hit.

I'm pretty familiar with how scrap works and what a small amount like what this thread is about is worth.

If you have a lot of something non-ferrous, say 200,000 lbs or so you can just about name your price on the world market when times are decent.

If you are like most shops and end up with a spare thousand lbs or so of aluminum every now and then it's worth about 25 cents a lb to the scrap buyers or to the home shop Harry's.

I'm pretty baffled as to how this ever got bid up so high. I kinda doubt there were two people ignorant enough to bid that much. I'm thinking it was a shill situation and this guy didn't know what was going on.

Was this a bidspotter type of platform?

If you don't know, if you bid more than one minimum increment above the current bid the auctioneers and anyone else bidding can tell. So if you go into it thinking you're going to win something and throw down a big number you will almost always find you win it for one bid increment less than your max bid.

I bet that's what happened here.
 








 
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