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Material Shortages

landesskis

GONE WEST
Curious if any manufacturer's have any ins on 4130 plate (1/8" thick, annealed preferred) and Titanium. Material lead times and cost is the worst I have ever seen. The material lead time for my nose forks are taking 6 months, and titanium is almost a year. Boeing just visited and they are pooling their companies to order larger lots of material. The bad thing is all the consolidation in the steel industry, raw titanium still comes from Russia, but only one or two plants are left (in the U.S.) that can process it to aircraft quality. Material costs are just sky high (composite resin is oil based).
 
We use 4130 normalized .250 plate and lead is only a couple of weeks. I have some annealed, not sure of the thickness though, let me check on it.
I do have a bunch of titanium in sheets of various sizes that I would like to get rid of. It is all 6AL 4V as thin as .200, some .016, but mostly .040. I have certs for all of the material.
 
Just looked, I have two sheets of .080 4130 annealed and 5 of .250 4130 annealed I would like to get rid of. I have certs for this material as well.
 
I was just talking to a friend about this two days ago. We were on the subject of bicycles but the material is often the same 4130 Steel 6/4 Titanium and carbon fiber. He said some of the stuff comming out of Asia is fiberglass being sold as carbon fiber and the price of a custom Ti frame is double what it was a few years ago.
 
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