Well then go to http://makezine.com/ and meet our friends at Make! They’ll show you how to custom build strange, exotic, wonderful, and useful gadgets and gizmos…and if you’ve built one of your own, they’ll let you brag about it on their BLOG.
Now, if you’re wondering where to get your materials. …well…ahem…I bet you know where I’m going to send you.
If it’s something other than metal, you really should check out their Maker Shed Store! DIY Kits, Tools, Books, and Fun!!!
As for me, I should get back to work. I’ll probably end up back at Makeazine.com, because it’s really addictive, but if you see my boss …tell him I’m working!
We want to send our thanks to everyone over at Fine Woodworking Magazine for mentioning Online Metals in their latest issue.
Thanks to you too John McCormack, for using our materials in your Ultimate Cross Cut Sled. It turned out beautifully.
You can read the article below, or run out and grab the issue at your local news stand. I did! (Seriously, it’s front and center, displayed on my office bookshelf!)
One of the things I do a lot of is read blog posts, and a site that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to of late is Consumerist. It is basically a documentation of some of the horrific customer service that is foisted upon customers every day by America’s largest and most “well-respected” companies.
I read Consumerist for two reasons:
To make sure I don’t do a whole lot of business with the companies that are repeat offenders.
To make sure we don’t end up there.
All kidding aside, one of the reasons we were able to grow from running our business out of (literally) a shed in the back of John’s house is that we take customer service incredibly seriously. In a business like ours, referrals and reliability are everything. That’s one of the reasons we started up the OnlineMetals Customer Survey about 5 years ago. Over the years, it has been a good indicator of not only where we stood with customers, but, just as importantly, where we needed to go.
We’ve always had a pretty simple philosophy about customer service, which my dad used to call the 12 Words of Business:
Don’t Lie
If You Say It, Do It
Tell Bad News Fast
We always hope to live up to those 12 words, but there are times when it doesn’t happen. When something goes wrong, we attempt to make it right. With that in mind, we’ve created a new set of guidelines for returns, which you can see in its entirety on its own special page.
Our people are not robots, however. They have the ability, if they judge it necessary, to go outside the guidelines we’ve created in order to keep a customer satisfied. That is the way it has always been, and that is the way that it will continue to be in the future.
Today we take our hats off to one of the great bloggers in history, Will Leitch, whose last day at Deadspin is this Friday. Will founded Deadspin about 3 years ago, and is leaving to take a job which will actually require him to get out of his parents’ basement for at least a couple of days a week - he’s to become a contributing editor at the New Yorker.
I owe a lot of my blogging, as opposed to writing, style, to Will. While the subject matter he covers, sports, has absolutely nothing to do with metals, he showed how snark could be combined with wit and information to provide a first-class blogging experience.
I know I’ve got no chance of ever being that good, if only because I refuse to use the Royal We, but I hope that some of spirit imbues what we’re doing here. Yes, we’re a commercial blog, and we try to find a way to work stuff back to what we do here, but we attempt to be as entertaining as possible while we’re doing it.
PetSugar.com rated our partner Amazon.com as one of the top 4 pet friendly places to work!
“Amazon: Anywhere from 24 to 36 dogs come to work daily at the Seattle, WA, headquarters. Owners must first register their pups and agree to rules like keeping vaccines up to date and staying on a leash — unless they’re in their office, of course. ”
3 dogs come to work daily at the OnlineMetals Seattle, WA, headquarters. Pets must register their owners, and agree to keep them leashed to their desk, hard at work, and of course, fully vaccinated.
Online Metals has always thought fondly of our neighbors to the north, and have really enjoyed doing business with you so far. We know that doing business with US companies can be a bit more of a hassle though. There are brokerage fees, and GSTs, and PST’s, and just a little too much BSt’s if you ask me.
So we’re not going to take it anymore!!! Online Metals is working with UPS to absorb all of those funny little COD charges that go along US imported products.
What does that mean for you? The price you see for the product, is the price you’ll pay DOOR TO DOOR! Starting VERY VERY VERY SOON, when you visit OnlineMetals.com click on the Canadian Flag, and place your order there. It’s quick, it’s painless, and it doesn’t require a checkbook.
Anyway, we want to thank you again for doing business with us. May our relationship grow bigger and stronger for years to come!
I get irrational over very few things. Neil O’ Donnell throwing away Super Bowl XXX. Hanging curveballs. You get the idea. As a metals guy, though, I get more than a little goofy over the way that metals are used in movies.
This is the first in what I’m sure will be a long-running series of rants talking about how movies oversimplify or otherwise misrepresent metals. By the way, Hollywood, consider this my attempt to become a technical advisor on the next Megan Fox film. (Note to OnlineMetals art department - completely gratuitous picture of Ms. Fox would be totally appropriate here.)
From the art department - no problem.
Case in point: Disney’s October Sky. Not a bad movie overall. Laura Dern is pretty good looking, and her attempt at a West Virginia accent is…interesting. The theme isn’t bad. I even like the story, even more so that it is essentially true.
But what I can’t handle is this exchange:
Roy Lee: Are you sure we need this nozzle thing?
Quentin: Are you kidding? The nozzle is the most important part - it directs the flow of the hot gases!
Roy Lee: Hey, cool it, Quentin! Man, talkin’ ’bout your ‘hot gases’…
Later…
Homer: It’s referred to as a nozzle, sir.
Mr. Bolden: Son, you can call it whatever you wanna call it…but you’re gonna have to have a better steel that can take the heat. Now I’d say S.A.E. 1018 bar stock ought to do you fine, and I can order it for you.
Homer: Well, that’d be great, Mr. Bolden.
Mr. Bolden: But it’s kind of expensive.
Look, I respect all the metals. They all have their purposes. But to hold up 1018 as an expensive high-end engineering steel is just totally pushing things too far. Based on what I saw, it looked like they were using a 6″ long piece of 3″ Round 1018 Rod.
Hmmm…wish I had a fast and easy source to find out how much that stuff costs. Oh, wait, there’s a place on the internet that sells these things. Looks like a 12″ piece runs $34.67 plus shipping. If you figure that prices have gone up 15 times since the mid-1950’s in which the movie was set, you’re talking about $2.50 worth of metal, or roughly a half a tank of gas at that time. Expensive for some kids growing up in a West Virginia coal town, but hardly back-breaking.
But back to 1018. As a steel, it is pretty good for general-purpose uses, but probably not the best for a rocket exhaust nozzle. You want stuff that can deal with heat, how about a nice alloy steel? If you really want to do it right, get your hands on some stainless, which is the most commercially available high temperature material.
Thanks to Script-O-Rama for the transcription, and thanks to Al Gore for inventing the internet, which made my search possible. And a special thanks to Google Image Search, which needs to do some work on finding pictures of Megan Fox. I only lost 5 or 6 hours today trying to decide which picture I would try to sneak into this post.
As you’ve seen from the posts that we decided to start with, we kind of like to have fun around here, and we’re going to keep doing that until they make us stop. From time to time, however, the actual business world intrudes, so we’ve got an update for our customers in Washington State.
The basic news is that the way that sales tax is calculated is changing. For the longest time, sales tax has been calculated based on where items ship from, meaning that for all practical purposes, items that are shipped by OnlineMetals are taxed at the Seattle/King County tax rate (currently 9%).
Under the new system, which starts on July 1, taxes will be calculated based on where the product is shipping to. If you live in a lower-tax area, congratulations!
Our customers will not see an appreciable change - we’ll have a short description on the checkout page. The tax will calculate automatically. if you opt to pick up material in our warehouse, the sales tax rate will be whatever the Seattle tax rate is at the time.
Why is this change taking place?
In the good old days, the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution ruled the land. It basically said that only the Federal Government could regulate (tax) interstate commerce. For all practical purposes, it meant that no sales taxes were levied on interstate shipments. This was very, very good for the growth of the Internet.
Many states, however, realized that shipments that crossed state lines represented a potential new source of revenue. 30 or 40 of them came up with a plan to tax those shipments. The first phase of this plan is to move to destination-based taxation, which is what brings us back to the coming change on July 1.
Once these states switch to destination-based taxation, there is apparently some method to begin charging taxes on interstate commerce, but that is still a ways down the line, because of the insane amount of rates and classifications across the states.
So, I’ll be attempting to implement this in the coming weeks. I anticipate a fair amount of growling and snapping as I get things in place.
The latest in this comic to movie trend hits closer to our business, and we’re excited to see how they do.
If you haven’t heard of Metal Men, and I’ll be honest, I hadn’t. It’s a group of robots made out of specific metals.
Copper
Gold
Iron
Lead
Mercury
Nameless
Platinum (The Girl.)
Tin
Invented by Dr. William Magnus, the Metal Men each possess the characteristics and interpreted personalities of separate metals, such as stretchy leader Gold, strongman Iron, insecure Tin, and brain damaging causing Lead.
We’re really excited to work with these guys, and think you might want
Customers can talk about what they want to build, and wait bids from a number of manufacturers who want to build their creation.
Manufacturers can bid and win customer accounts, to create some really cool things.
