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Consumables Mass Quantities

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Joined
Aug 15, 2013
Messages
3,194
Location
Western US
Just a quick heads-up about trends that I've noticed in the composites supplies market.

Small-ish composites shops like mine exist in a sort of middle ground between hobbyists (RC sailplanes, telescope bodies, etc) and huge factories (car bodies, production airplanes, yacht hulls). Unlike the hobbyists, we tend to buy enough of the consumables stack for about 200 ft^2 at a time (think wing set or fuselage set), and we are also rather price sensitive in terms of dollar per unit area. But unlike the big boys, we don't really buy enough at a time to get very good discounts even on our bulk orders.

For years, my go-to solution has been to order from the Airtech International online store. They sold Stretchalon vacuum membrane in 200' rolls, peel ply in 25-yard rolls, and low-cost edge sealing tape in boxes of ten 50-foot rolls. However, this week I went to place an order with Airtech, and noticed that their online store has been drastically overhauled, but not in a good way. All the low-cost products we use in room-temp processes are gone, and all that's left are the very priciest things used in high-temp autoclave processes.

My sense of what's going on is that small shops like mine are starting to either offshore their work, or are starting to buy their consumables direct from suppliers in China. The hobbyists aren't really affected, since doubling the price of a foot of stretchalon has little effect on the overall price of a project. And the windmill guys are still buying by the truckload, so their discounts are secure. But folks like me are starting to feel the pinch.

Oh, and if you try to get this stuff on eBay or Amazon, you see that it's aimed at the hobbyist, with quantities in feet and inches and prices ranging from twice to ten times what I can get in reasonable bulk orders.

I just thought I'd throw this out there for discussion. Right now I've got a last order in for a 100-yard roll of peel ply at basically the same $/area as I used to get the 25-yard shorties for. But I'm not sure what I'll do when my stretchalon runs out. I used to get 200-foot rolls for $225, but they now only sell it in the 2000-foot roll. The price is an attractive $1400, but that's a lot of money to tie up in material that might go bad or get ruined before we can use it.

I guess that one solution would be for me to place bulk orders with Airtech, break it up into a bunch of short rolls, and sell it from an online store at prices that split the difference between what Airtech used to get and what the eBay folks are asking. I wouldn't necessarily mind running my own composites supplies store, but it's not necessarily what I had in mind when I started making gliders.

--Bob K.
 
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