Business and COVID-19

[bectisewilliam]

Hey guys,
 

Hows the business going due to COVID-19 pandemic?

[ThomasPowers]

As I don't depend on my smithing for income and folks are turning loose of stuff to help their income; things are good.  I've been trying to buy stuff from my local Father&Son scrapyard to help keep them afloat.

[rockstar.esq]

I can't answer for blacksmiths, however I can say that "essential" construction trades out here are in desperate shape right now.  Developers cancelled or postponed basically everything since March.  The only commercial market segments that are moving forward with work are schools, clinics, and big empty buildings known in the industry as "Core and Shells".

I hear that homebuilders are booming, but it's predominately single family homes, not multi-family.

There are rumors going around among firms with large metro offices that they expect to stop remote working and mandate a return to offices in mid November.  Of course, that may be wishful thinking among contractors who build offices for a living.

After six months of struggle, I can honestly report that the "just in time" procurement channels are still in chaos.  Every job in the last nine months has required extensive re-specification for fixtures because short notice to proceed coupled with long material lead times were making it impossible to meet the schedules.  Nine out of ten re-specification efforts took long enough that the lead times doubled on the replacement specifications.  Factories either couldn't or wouldn't provide accurate information on lead times because their suppliers, and their workforce are interrupted by new regulations that come with immediate effect, and without an expiration date. 

We were recently informed that the tropical storms that hit the US in conjunction with large orders from overseas have put certain resins in short supply.  PVC conduit cost has more than doubled in the past week, and the lead time to get significant quantities is now measured in months.  We were forced to buy large stocks early to protect slow-moving projects that involve large quantities of PVC conduit.

 

 

[anvil]

About the same in the Durango area. Altho there are at least two condo/apartment  complex going strong. 

single family and owner built are strong. as best i can see, the crafts are as busy as ever. 

[ThomasPowers]

Going north on I-25 yesterday I passed a convoy of 18 wheelers carrying steel trusses, full length of their trailers; 8-10 trucks.  Someone is getting supplies for a large project!  (May have been made in Mexico as I-25 starts fairly close to Juarez.)

[George N. M.]

Same in Laramie.  Single and multi-family homes going up and are being bought as soon as they are available.  My neighbor works at a title company and is putting in 12 hour days.  Construction trades are booming.  I think people are moving out of metro areas after they realize that if they are working remotely they can be anywhere.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[rockstar.esq]

Thomas,

Just guessing here, but there was a properly massive Amazon warehouse facility going up at the South end of Colorado.

[JHCC]

Like ThomasPowers, I don't depend on smithing for my livelihood, although I have gotten a few decent little jobs that have kept me in propane, grinder belts, and books!

For my day gig as a higher education fundraiser, it's been a pretty huge change in how we do our work, but the core of the job -- helping donors identify their philanthropic priorities and facilitating their making them happen -- remains unchanged. We're somewhat lucky in that when we had to make major changes in our operations -- moving a lot of our teaching online, having many of our students studying in blended online/in-person classes, inviting alumni and friends to give virtual workshops as part of our Junior Practicum, setting up facilities and contracts for universal testing of all staff, students, and faculty, etc, etc, etc -- we had already gone through a major self-study as part of rethinking our whole strategic planning process and implementation. In other words, we already had the mindset that we needed to make changes, that we were going to be able to figure out what they would have to be, and that we had the individual and institutional courage to put them in place. A lot of other schools that hadn't done that kind of process were starting out half a mile behind the blocks and had to do things that might have been necessary in the short term but without consideration of how they would fit into the long-term picture.

[anvil]

Forgot to mention in the Rocky mtn west and further west, firefighting business is pretty hot, so to say, at the moment. Both in the woods and in a few major cities.  

[rockstar.esq]

Anvil isn't joking.  Two weeks ago Northern Colorado could have served as a film set for Mars!  Every single day I'm grateful for those firefighters.

[ThomasPowers]

I remember the year there were a lot of fires in AZ and we were getting ash on our parked cars 100+ miles east of them. (Of course when Yellowstone blows up we are forecast to get Volcanic ash dumped on us down here too.)

[anvil]

Yea, my best friend bought 160 acres up by the Cameron Peak fire last summer. He is a little east and south about a mile below the fire line. The snow helped. I heard this AM it's picked up again. 

I've been too close to 2 big Colorado fires. Its an experience.

And, yes, every day God bless those firefighters!

[arkie]

Amen to the firefighters as well!!!  Those guys are on the fire lines not just days, but weeks, even months.  I don't know how they do it, even with relief teams.  I know when standing near a small bonfire, the heat can be unbearable...a forest fire (plus PPE) has to be indescribable.

[rockstar.esq]

Thomas,  I figure that worrying about a Yellowstone eruption is pointless.  It would end everything out here before we knew what happened.  It would likely end everything for most of the world, but they'd suffer longer than I did.

 

[ThomasPowers]

But what if an asteroid hits right when Yellowstone is exploding and the magnetic poles are flipping and the Van Allen Belt(s) go down during a massive solar flare?  Would it impact my forge welds?

[JHCC]

Not so you'd notice.

[Frosty]

I'm counting on the poles flipping directing the asteroid into Yellowstone and plugging the hot spot. 

A giant CME without the magnetosphere to shield us might be an issue. How much soil cover would it take to shield us from solar radiation during a bad flare? 

I'm actually wondering about soil depth as radiation shielding on the moon. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

Luckily we have a LOT of abandoned mines out here; just one local mountain has over 20 miles of shafts.  After becoming an insulin dependent diabetic I stopped worrying about apocalypse scenarios.  Way back before 1960 "Alas Babylon"  covered what happens to diabetics when refrigeration stops...

I always wondered if I should collect a bunch of solar scientific calculators and hide them deep in a mine in a grounded air/water tight container---like an ammo can.   Sure be nice to have them later after an EMP.... (My father had a chinese engineer working for him that as a  US University Frat initiation was required to memorize the log tables.  Back in  China when WWII erupted the Japanese collected all the log tables, calculators, slipsticks, etc for their war effort.  He was one of the few people who could continue to work as an engineer without the physical copies!)

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

I work for TH Foods, and we make the Blue Diamond snack cracker as well as our own Crunchmaster crackers. We are going through North of 50,000# of rice a day, and working 6 and 7 weeks.