A not so poisoned chalice

So we all watched it did we, who’d have thought after Bejing that  we would make a success of the Olympics. After watching the opening ceremony with our hands over our eyes, and then GB doing so well after a shaky start we finally relaxed and it seems most of us enjoyed it after all. Then there was the closing ceremony, a right ol’ knees up, we had a bit of an idea what to expect after the opening one. There were the usual suspects, Brian May and the fat bloke from Bury singing about his curtains, shoe ins for this type of event.  Obviously the highlight for me was the Olympic flame and how they were going to extinguish it.

In recent times the olympic flame has been a bit jinxed, surely something had  to go wrong, I mean it was a minor miracle that 17 tonnes of copper sitting in the east end for almost 3 weeks was still there at all.  I had sat through Annie Lennox on a longboat, the pet shop boys in rickshaws and that well known stalwart of British musical culture Russell Brand on top of a bus. If someone had told me that next up was going to be Bernie Flint and the Grumble weeds  singing This charming man with the lady from the shake and vac ads, I would have had no reason to doubt them. Eventually the moment arrived, the mechanical decommisioning of Thomas Heatherwicks 8.5m high sculpture. 300 sheets of copper were used in the sculpture built in a disused hanger near Harrogate. Each petal engraved with one of the countries represnted in the games, and each one reminiscent of the copper  tube lillies a lot of the old boys I used to work with had made for their gardens.

Often over looked in recent times there are few metals that have the natural decorative properties as copper. Whether bright or aged the range of finishes it produces  make for perfect ornaments and work well when used with other non ferrous metals. Ok so working with it can be a ball ache, but does it really do any harm to brush up on those traditional techniques now and then.  Yes it’s expensive in sheet form, but in this age of austerity  there  is plenty of opportunity to get your hands on it for scrap value. Some of those old boilers have great shapes for lantern tops and clean up really well.  A malleable material that is strong, has good corrosion resistence. Is easy to form and can be finished to a number of attractictive textures and colours, has to be worth considering for the modern metalsmith looking to create something different..

Chinese to become less reliant on steel imports

One of the objectives of this blog is to keep and eye on the current trends in commodity prices that are likely to affect readers.  The current climate makes it more and more difficult to pass the cost of raw materials on to end users and it is very likely as has been happening  in a lot of cases that people take the hit and the profits become smaller while overheads get higher. Of course all this does is increase the possibility of cashflow problems later down the line. It can often seem like a mystery to most of us when our  stockholders inform us of price increases. Either it’s too much demand hiking the prices up or too little demand hiking the prices up and anyway it’s all down to the Chinese, its no wonder with such logic that the conspiracy theorists have been hard at work.

Recently however things do seem to have levelled out a little and hopefully this is just the beginning of a new age of stability. According to Zhu Jimin chairman of the China Iron and Steel Association the development of China’s domestic iron ore mines had been speeded up and was now growing at an annual rate of about 20%, gradually reducing China’s dependence on overseas imports. A little cohesion for the longer term would go a great way to easing the headaches of the small business person, here’s hoping.