On Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:59:57 -0800, Smitty Two
wrote:

In article ,
mm wrote:

Though it turned out that 1/4" square aluminum rod only came, it
seems, in one length and material. That's fine with me.

I was wrong about this. It came in 3 materials, different kinds of
aluminum, and I did read and rely on the chart. But it would have
been easy to go back a screen and check out all three materials.

For the all-purpose aluminum, it only came in 6 feet and 8 feet.

FWIW, at onlinemetals.com, it came iirc in 1(maybe),2,3,4,5,6,7, and 8
feet. They even had a note "cut to length". FTR, they also sell
plastic.

Square stock or rectangular stock is called "bar stock," not "rod." I

Sometimes. It's not the most pro-oriented location, but the display
for steel at Home Depot referred to round tube, square tube, round
rod, and square rod. (For aluminum they had three of these but
neither square rod nor bar stock.)

guess if you searched for aluminum, then that's the material you'd get.
But if I do a search for bar stock, I see it in aluminum, brass, bronze,
copper, iron, lead, stainless steel, steel, tin, titanium, plastics,
rubber and foam.

That's good that it gives all that, but I started with aluminum.

Go to some of those and I see it available in several different alloys,
and several lengths.

I narrowed the aluminum down to 1/4" wide and 1/4" thick, and see it in
3 different alloys, two of which come in 6' lengths and the other one in
8' lengths. I guess since it's less than $5, they don't bother to sell
shorter pieces. 1/4" square brass shows it available in 2', 4', 6', or
8'.

Very interesting. I would think before the web, it would have been
taken forever to find this much variety.