You can't buy 20 pieces of aluminum tube online | Hacker News Reader

You can't buy 20 pieces of aluminum tube online

vestalmetals.com

19 pointspdfiv19 comments

Living in France, this experience sounds really alien to me. All the workshops i've been involved in have like 2/3 professional suppliers, some more specialized in different product categories, and usually all it takes is a phone call and a car trip to get your parts.

How it works is the supplier has predefined lengths / surfaces with associated price, and you buy an entire unit but they will cut it however you like. So no, i can't buy a single 0.4m unit, but i can buy an entire 6m unit and have it chopped down to 0.4 units (usually for a small fee). Never had to wait more than 10 minutes to have my units ready. Never involved any secretary spending half an hour determining a price.

Admittedly i've never worked with aluminum, but i know people who do that for a living and i've never heard of supply issues. Maybe that's a really US problem that's described in this article? Or maybe my view is skewed because of being close to bigger cities where the suppliers are.

I'm surprised it's not like buying wood. You buy standard lengths and they're happy to cut it for you. They'll keep the off-cuts if you don't want them but you've paid for them so you might as well haul them home.

Seems inspired by https://noxmetals.co/quote which is great. We need plenty more suppliers like this around the US.

Yep, Nox is doing this for aluminum plate and is doing it well. They're proof the model works. I'm doing tube, which is a different problem, with different suppliers, different saws, and 1D nesting instead of 2D. Agreed we need more of these.

He is entirely right. I often want short bits and the precut short lengths on Amazon are often the lowest friction. But when I need 4 feet I often just give up! Good luck to him

"When I need 4 feet I often just give up" is the entire thesis in one sentence. Thanks.

I don't usually pick up on whether an article is written/edited by an LLM, but I suspect this one is because it has the exact cadence of those X posts about how AI is going to take all our jobs by Friday.

I hope it's accurate, because it's interesting. On-demand manufacturing lets you beat economies of scale. I have some beloved print-on-demand comics on my shelf that would never be considered for traditional publication.

This is mystifying to me. I had a membership in a maker shop and took a welding course. I had a project in mind and bought 6 pieces of stainless tubing online. They came in standard lengths but iirc they would cut them for an additional charge. If there was a minimum order it was lower than 6, prices were right there on the page, there was none of the friction the writer is talking about, and this was 16 years ago.

Interesting, but I got to this:

"Pricing cut-to-length tube is not "price per pound times pounds." It's a one-dimensional bin packing problem, and the details are where the money hides."

which is one of the a peak LLM sentence. ug.

It has the ring of “load-bearing” and “belts and suspenders”, but in this case, it really is a one-dimensional bin packing problem.

I thought hn agreed to stop acusing everything of being an LLM and also not to discount everything produced by an LLM as worthless.

This guy is onto something. It is not easy to get tube at anything like it's real price.

I'm concerned that he will find shipping it to customers is just as difficult

I opened with saying the article was interesting, but I still feel a deep sense of revulsion when I see LLM-isms like this. I will continue to call them out because I want them to stop and I don't have any other way to vent about it. I think at this point, social pressure is the only lever left to bring people back to writing their own words.

What's wrong with buying the standard length (which doesn't require special processing by the supplier so doesn't suffer from the minimum order size or shipping delays) and cutting it up yourself?

But its trivial to buy 20 pieces of aluminum tubes online? There are so many providers in most nations, that sell all kinds of shapes of all kinds metals. What am I missing?

Whenever I have tried it has come out as prohibitively expensive. I suspect they just price their waste into the GM. Sell the tube at 4x the price and whatever cutting waste you have is covered

This is cool and all, but every manufacturing plant in existence has these problems and has developed tools to speed it up. Everyone has something special that doesn't fit just right, or has an infinite number of combinations to solve for.

This seems more like a free-market problem where there just isn't any incentive to capture a market below a minimum.

I think you are right. Most suppliers have decided this is simply not worth solving.

I suspect when he looks at the distribution costs he will find the same

Honestly I don't have a good answer yet. Freight is the part I know the least about, and it might be the thing that kills this. I do know that cut pieces bundle onto LTL a lot more easily than 24 foot sticks do, but I won't know real numbers until I'm quoting freight on live orders. Ask me again in six months.

I don't think it would kill it.

Even if an estimating tool comes up with a higher price, as long as they can reduce the time to do a quote, it helps.

I think problem here is thinking that eliminating the cost of the manpower to do the estimate will bring cost down enough to do the job.

When really, they need to introduce a premium for small/odd jobs. A lot of people understand that small/odd orders are going to cost more. So a tool to efficiently get them a small/odd cost is still good. The order is going to cost more, but if you are ordering small/odd, you accept that.

The goal is to get the companies to have a tool that is efficient enough to even take peoples calls.

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