With tariffs now looming large on key materials for not only experimental but all aircraft built in the USA - What is the reaction and response of the industry? Will the kitters have to impose higher prices on their products?
With tariffs now looming large on key materials for not only experimental but all aircraft built in the USA - What is the reaction and response of the industry? Will the kitters have to impose higher prices on their products?
Wow, sure quiet on this thread.
Probably too soon to know what impact tariffs (that may or may not occur) will have on the kit industry.
Jim, I didn't expect much here because this subject is 100% politics and we all know how our overseers feel about that.Originally Posted by Jim Heffelfinger
However, I will add the following caveat. Your omnipotent leader has proven to be exactly like the old refrain about the weather. If you don't like it, stick around for 5 minutes, it'll change. GUARANTEED!
Political today - more expensive tomorrow. Ripples to all of us. Caveat noted.
I have no facts but will offer an opinion. Of course tariffs will trickle into the economy as higher prices. However, my experience with working with metals in an industrial setting was that if I wanted metals that met specifications, I had to buy US manufactured. The cheap foreign metals usually had so many contaminates that they rarely met spec. The sad part of this is that the market is so flooded with cheap material from overseas, that some materials we needed were no longer manufactured in the US. All that was available was the cheap stuff from overseas which proved to be unusable in an industrial setting.
Example: I needed to fabricate a new rack made of pure Molybdenum for a high temperature vacuum furnace used to heat treat various metals. Moly mesh is no longer manufactured in the US. Only available from China. Had to buy a case of the stuff to get the one sheet I needed. Once it arrived, I fabricated the rack I needed and ran one cycle in my furnace only to find the moly had so many impurities in it that it contaminated my vacuum furnace coating it with a dusting of Aluminum from the "pure" moly. I ended up scrapping the whole case of material as it was useless. It had close to 1% aluminum contaminate in the Moly, which would vaporize and coat the inside of the furnace at high temperature. From that point forward, everything that goes into that furnace would pick up a light dusting of Aluminum contaminates.
How does that apply to aviation? We build planes with materials that meet manufacturers spec. I could be wrong, but I don't think a lot of the aluminum or 4130 we are using comes from overseas. Based on my experience in industry, if it did, I wouldn't use it.
Those countries that were hit with tariffs are already charging us high tariffs to sell goods in their countries. So let's level the playing field. Free trade is only free when it's free in both directions. If our trade partners don't want a level field, then I would rather pay higher prices for quality products manufactured at home. In fact, you may find that with higher production numbers for US based manufacturing, the higher volume may equate to lower prices. That may be a pipe dream, but I'll hold on to that dream for a while.
This from Fox - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_WcZ4pExNw
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