Where to get metal?

Er, where are you located?

I like these guys.

Phone book. Steel is cheap and easy to find.

Just £50 usually puts more steel on the driveway than I really want to lift onto the racks ! It's 3x too long for me to store, as delivered, so there's some time with the bandsaw to get it into shorter lengths first. Be flexible about how soon you need it, and you can keep delivery costs down. Our place does its own delivery by truck and doesn;t charge extra for a small load, so long as you can wait a few days until they're next driving past.

Start squealing about how you only want one bar, and you want it now! and you'll easily pay more in shipping than for the steel itself.

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

If you need small amounts, I have had good luck dealing with some of the local fabricators; they have been willing to sell me cutoffs (by which I mean up to 10' long) for pretty near cost ... and sometimes I gather a whole bunch of odds and ends of cutoffs that I have a use for and pay a few bucks for the lot.

The only problem is, you not only need to find a fabricator willing to take the time to sell, but also that is working with steel in the sizes you need. What I have been buying has been much smaller than you are looking for -- up to 1/4" max -- and the fab shops I've been getting it from are fairly small. YMMV!

where's your place Andy ? ;o) I'm in Yorkshire anyone know of a good service here ?

--Ikie

Like another interlocutor wrote, look in the phone book under "steel." Around here, most outfits that sell steel move the vast majority of their volume to commercial fabricators and not to 'weekend guys' like thee and me; but they'll sell to anyone. Some have a minimum purchase of, say, 150lbs. (Metal is usually sold by the pound.)

Another source is your local metal scrap yard. The steel is mostly used and often painted and maybe rusted or dirty. Many scrap yards receive off-cuts (read, clean new steel) from local fabricators. At my local yard, the off-cuts are sold at scrap prices. Scrap prices are usually 1/2 the per pound price of new (least, that's the way it is here).

Good luck on your projects.

Ciao, David Todtman

Bristol (woodworking) / Welsh valleys (steel)

It is getting harder to find steel (and similar stuff, like firebrick) in the valleys. With the steelworks winding down, a lot of the small support suppliers are going too 8-(

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

I guess you can say you are -lucky-

I went to the local fab shop/guy, and asked if I could look in his scrap/junk pile to find some odd size angle iron I needed. he said sure, and pointed me to the corner of his lot, it had about 15' by 15' of scrap piled on top of each other in every formation, bent rusty metal , and tall grass growing through it. I a managed to get 2 4-5 foot 1.5 x 1.5 pieces of angle iron out of there.

I asked the guy politely ---what do you want for it ? I was hoping he say - "just go ahead and take it" or may be a $1 or two. but he wanted $5 for it. it did not sound too good of a deal. I said , sorry for the trouble mate, and left.

It's the same in West Yorkshire since most of the large engineering firms closed in the 80's ;o( I find myself looking around scrapyards for anything worth saving.

--Ikie

Hmmm -- did you make a counter offer? Of course, no way to know how the person might have responded ... as you say, I have been lucky to find some places willing to deal, though I also talked to a few places that were not along the way!