WTF is going on with the raw materials market???

11GTCS said:

I’m still waiting for some equipment that was ordered last August, it’s been delayed shipping three times now.  Two other orders in play with six month lead times, one of which is 11 smaller rooftop HVAC units that were in stock when I originally quoted the project.  Too bad the customer couldn’t make up their mind.  Price went up roughly 20% while they were thinking about it which fortunately is not an 11GTCS problem.   

We’re still selling work like it’s never going to end, my fear is all these orders arrive at the same time and we can’t staff the jobs fast enough to finish the work so we can pay for it all.   Nothing is easy right now.  

That's not going to end until Q4 2024 at a minimum, because that's when the ESSER program ends (so far).

We're doing dozens of millions of dollars of mechanical / HVAC work right now because the ESSER program is targeted for that kind of infrastructure work at state-level agencies.  Plus having that kind of stuff funded by a federal program instead of the local agency means that every agency suddenly has money to spend on other things like roof replacements... driving prices on unrelated work insane as well.

Inflation caused by this program means that local agencies are getting maybe 60% bang for the buck, but no one gives a E36 M3 because it's "free money" from the feds and if they don't spend it then it evaporates.  It won't end until the federal spending does.  And that's as close to the patio as I'm going to get.

Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief?

https://legacy.trade.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/imports-us.pdf

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/steel/steelp_2203.pdf

This data would indicate that china is not the primary for steel imports. However I have to wonder if tariffs have hurt production and pricing (in addition to the obvious, Covid). The leading importers have been Canada, S. Korea, Mexico, and Brazil. Just like many things I think that Covid has opened things wide open that are a weak point in the world.

pheller said:

Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief?

Yes.  There have been several waves of it.  It was intended as a stimulus package providing funding to public school districts nationwide for (mostly mechanical / HVAC-related) infrastructure improvements.  Won't somebody think of the children etc.

It has stimulated my part of the construction industry the same way all those kilos of coke stimulated Tony Montana.  Thus proving my hypothesis that there is no creature on earth dumber than a Keynesian economist.

People that make our extrusions (proprietary, we own the dies) are trying to ask us if we can cut the thickness of the extruded material by ~1/3 (in fairness to them, they probably looked through our history and saw V1.0 of our current product where we had this thickness.)  This a structural system that we've updated to take into account new standards.

They worked their people to death in early pandemic, they all quit, now the people they've hired are inexperienced enough that they can't put out our system without it warping due to the heat from extrusion

Duke said:

pheller said:

Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief?

Yes.  There have been several waves of it.  It was intended as a stimulus package providing funding to public school districts nationwide for (mostly mechanical / HVAC-related) infrastructure improvements.  Won't somebody think of the children etc.

It has stimulated my part of the construction industry the same way all those kilos of coke stimulated Tony Montana.  Thus proving my hypothesis that there is no creature on earth dumber than a Keynesian economist.

What was the reasoning behind so much spending being directed towards HVAC improvements? Cleaner air in a COVID laden school? Better efficiency units? 

I always have some doubts about stimulus packages directed at high dollar projects that have very high materials and labor costs, but relatively little employment opportunities. Road building, for example, used to be very labor intensive, but cheap materials. Now that's its mostly done with equipment, you only need a few guys to build miles of roadway. In that way, it's not stimulus. Neither is the defense industry anymore. 

Stimulus would be labor intensive projects that have cheap materials. Teachers, actually, are a great example. But, to a certain extent, so is just giving money to those at the bottom of the economic scale. Trail building. Good stimulus. 

What I don't get is why we haven't had any stimulus on the home-building front. We need housing. Much of inflation is seen in rising housing costs. Why not both pay people and reduce housing costs by building more homes? Maybe even convince the states to get into the game by giving more of this home building stimulus to states who can acquire more land at cheaper prices, building homes cheaper, and then attracting new residents to new homes that are cheap?

Or heck, give more stimulus to those industries who produce building materials? Steel producers, lumber producers, concrete producers, etc. 

On a small scale for what I do, DOM tubing for roll bars and cages has more than doubled in 2 years! 1.75"x0.125" DOM tubing is now over $10 per foot! I used to keep several hindered feet of various sizes in stock at the shop all the time, but it's getting difficult to just find it sometimes and with the current price, I just don't want to sit on that much inventory. For the first time ever, I took a materials deposit from a customer before ordering materials for his cage. I didn't want to get stuck with $1000 of material should he have canceled the job. Tough times.