Online Metals Blog

He’s all about the accessories!

Is your New Year’s resolution to make more money? Well then why not add an OnlineMetals.com link to your website, and earn 5% on every order that you refer!

Yeah, cash money! Paid to you, each quarter, just for posting a link to a site you already love!

Learn more and sign up here:
http://www.onlinemetals.com/affiliates.cfm

Thanks in advance!

2 days isn’t enough time to celebrate the new year. So the OnlineMetals team is taking Monday off too!

We’ll be back bright and early (and maybe a little hung over) on Tuesday morning 1/3/2011

HAVE A SAFE, WONDERFUL, AND VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR!

From all of the “blockheads” here at OnlineMetals.com.

Festivus (”for the rest of us”) is celebrated on December 23rd, and consists of three main parts: The Airing of Grievances, The Feats of Strength, and the Aluminum Pole. The pole is unadorned, primarily because Mr. Costanza found himself “distracted by tinsel.”

If you haven’t ordered yours already, please know that our aluminum pipes meet the highest Festivus standards and will add greatly to your holiday celebration!

Shop here:
OnlineMetals.com Festivus Poles

Are you headed over to Google+? Take us with you!!!

Add the OnlineMetals page to your circles. We’d really appreciate it.

Here at OnlineMetals we’re always learning new stuff! This past Friday a customer called in looking for aluminum killed steel. None of us had any idea what he was talking about! After doing some research we found out that this is a product we carry. Who knew! So we thought we’d take a minute to share what we learned with our friends out in internet land:

So it turns out that Aluminum killed steel is ASTM A 1008 carbon steel.

The neat thing about this type of steel is that they use aluminum during the alloying process to deoxidize the metal. This makes the steel more structurally uniform and thus makes it heat treat more evenly. The end result is a steel that is better suited for difficult stamping and forming operations where other steels wouldn’t work. It’s also an optimal steel for drawing operations, hence it’s other code name “Drawing Steel type B.”

We think Aluminum killed steel has a better ring to it, don’t you?

As we say on our Product Guides Page: “…we all failed shop class. Multiple times. We’re also not engineers, and cannot make any specific recommendations about the suitability of a given alloy, temper, or shape for your project or application.”

But we’re ignoring that rule, to bring you this useful bit of info:

Happy Friday

New product! Cast Aluminum Plate!

Sizes and prices found here:
http://www.onlinemetals.com/merchant.cfm?id=309&step=2&top_cat=60

Metal geekery found below:
As the name would imply, this material is cast (unlike the rest of our plate items, which are rolled). The problem with rolled plate is that as you machine it, you release the internal stresses that build up as a part of the rolling process, and you get parts that aren’t flat, or which you have to do additional machining in order to get them back to flat.

Cast plate doesn’t react this way. It starts flat, and now matter how much you machine, it stays that way. Typical uses are for jigs. One specific application was on the old dot matrix printers, where the internal housing would be made of cast plate because of its stability.