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.

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.

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

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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

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.

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.

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?

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.