From the British Stainless Steel Association comes this downloadable pdf relating to the care and maintenance of stainless steel for a wide variety of appilications.

A cleaning frequency or schedule for external or various architectural application site types is shown and covers grades 1.4016 (430) 1.4301 (304) and 1.4401 (316). The sites include rural urban and coastal (marine). Cleaning suggestions for a range of situations are made. These include routine cleaning, removal of fingerprints, oil, grease marks, water marking, light rust staining, burnt on food, tea and coffee residues, mortar (cement) splashes, heavy discolouration, paint and graffiti. The dangers of using bleach (sodium hypochlorite) and hydrochloric acid based cleaning agents (brick mortar remover) are noted.

Now this covers everything from fingerprints on your sink, to caked on grease on your cooker, to removing rust marks. It’s a bit technical, but it has a table of removal methods and another about the cleaning frequency of different grades of stainless in different atmospheric conditions.

It mentions nothing about cleaning stainless steel with baby oil to its eternal discredit.

Download Care and Maintenance of Stainless Steel pdf.

I’m not a major fan of Google’s new Blog Search as it just chucks spam blogs at you like confetti

But, it’s not bad for finding quirky little blog posts relating to your specific search term.

Obviously, the search term I’m referring to is sheet metal. (Just click on the sheet metal link to see what I’m talking about on both fronts.)

I happened to find this little post talking about the EMP building in Seattle.

If ever there was a multi-million pound project the boys would be happy to sink their grinding discs into, it might just be this one.

The Frank Gehry designed building is explained wonderfully, but it’s obviously the exterior panelling that interests us:

The exterior consists of stainless steel and painted aluminum shingles, each individually cut and shaped. The stainless steel has three finishes: mirrored purple, lightly brushed silver, and bead-blasted gold. The red and blue sections are painted aluminum. Each finish takes on an exciting and unique shade when viewed from different angles around the building. The red will fade with time, altering the appearance of the building’s exterior and reflecting how music is ever changing. There are over 3,000 panels covering the exterior skin of EMP, each panel holding about seven shingles. Each shingle is a unique shape and size, cut and bent to fit exactly in its designed location. A total of 21,000 shingles cover the EMP exterior.

It’s well worth taking a look at some of the photos during construction to see the thing being realised and it’s also well worth taking a look at some pictures as it is now.

It’s one delightful lump of bashed tin.

Here’s a fabulous little article showing you how stainless steel is a cheaper material to use in the long term than mild steel when a whole picture is taken.

Or, in other words:

Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis is a means of quantifying the choice of materials for a product or construction, with the aim of selection of the most economic alternative.

There’s a splendid LCC equation and a splendid little case study with enough facts and figures to inwardly digest and befuddle your boss with it over a brew or confound your average customer with.

LCC=Acquisition Cost + Fabrication and Installation Cost + Maintenance Costs (periodic) + Replacement Costs (periodic) + Cost of Lost Production (periodic) - Residual (Scrap) Value

Just try not to become too pathologically supercillious when waffling about this to somebody just wanting a splashback.

Read the complete Life Cycle Costing of Stainless Steel article here.

Euro Inox has just emailed me a notice of their new 35-page pdf talking about all aspects of mechanical finishing with regards to stainless steel. It includes:

• Specifying mechanically finished surfaces for stainless steel fabrications
• Frequently used finishing methods
• Frequently used abrasives and power tools
• Best practice finishing
• Case studies
• Health, safety and environmental issues

It’s probably quite a handy guide to find out how we’d do our finishing to be fair - almost a generic how-to guide.

Here’s something I’ve managed to resurrect from the Tinpot Alley stainless steel planters archive. (By that I mean that I’ve found an old lead to download pictures off my camera!)

There would’ve been more but some over zealous security chap prevented me from doing so in case I was casing the joint to bomb it. I’m sure after five days of worthless exhibiting I may have felt suitably miffed, but when you’ve had a big sign saying Tinpot Alley and most of your business cards handed out, I doubt if I’d have gotten away with it.

You may recall the collective Butler Sheetmetal Ltd breakdown that took place trying to get organised for that damn Canary Wharf exhibition. Well this picture proves that it was more than worth being plonked in the middle of an underground mall whilst most people stole pebbles, booted the balls and vented their fury at us for the poor state of the ‘garden show’ in general.

Although, we did manage to flog one of the bay trees. It would’ve been two, but the guy would’ve struggled carrying them both on the tube.

John’s become very philosophical about the whole affair and his twitch is hardly noticeable as he mutters ‘You live and learn’, or ‘Just put it down to experience.’

Anyway, the above ribbed stainless steel planter was by far and away the crowd favourite from a planter and plant perspective - until the price was mentioned, of course. (For the record, it’s a John design )

No wonder we try and stick to bespoke.