Chrome Wire Tie Finds

I’m extremely happy to see my brother excelling as a small business owner here in our home town.

Back in our younger years, I worried about his reckless behavior and how it would eventually affect his future.

He had a group of friends that would go out and drink away their weekends until slinking back to their apartments while blacked out in a drunken stupor. It wasn’t that he was lazy or lacking in any goals, hopes, or dreams—it was watching my brother follow down the same path that led to our father’s death by liver failure only six years prior. Thankfully my brother met an amazing woman who inspired him to change his habits and stop drinking recklessly every single day of the week. He stopped drinking daily, then only once a week, before switching to once a month and ending with no alcohol whatsoever. He’s clean now and running a building supply company. He sells primarily concrete and steel rebar tie wire supplies to contractors from all over the state. He’s really stressed out right now because he’s short on type 304 and type 316 stainless steel rebar tie wire and double loop wire ties. His supplier is able to give him galvanized and zinc coated steel rebar tie wire, but the types 304 and 316 stainless steel are out of stock from all of the supply companies that he has in his contacts book. I’m trying to help him find a new supplier for stainless steel rebar tie wire, especially 14 gauge and 16 gauge rebar tie wire coils.

16 gauge stainless steel tie wire

At some point in the last few years, I lost any sort of restraint when it came to my backyard and the improvements and projects therein.

It started with the metal-frame swimming pool and the large wooden deck that I built around it.

I even built a water slide for my kids to use, which has become a huge hit among their friends that come over and spend time at our place. But since we live on 20 acres of land and have a huge backyard as a result, I definitely didn’t stop with the above-ground swimming pool. Once the pool was complete, we then worked on a small soccer field with two full-sized goals. My kids have all been interested in soccer from a young age, as it’s the same sport I played when I was a child as well. After my wife and I finally completed these two projects, I told her I wanted to do something for myself. For years I have wanted a small koi pond wherever I have lived. Even though we were renting before we purchased this property, I used to dream about digging a large hole in the backyard to put in a koi pond that I could simply remove after moving away. However, I never convinced myself that it was worth the trouble. But since we own the current property and don’t face any deed restrictions in this area, I was able to slowly build my koi pond whichever way I wanted it to look. This includes a new footbridge that will be like a small pier so I can walk to the center of the water and sit down in peace. The wooden pier itself will be attached to a concrete block that will be its base. I decided to use rebar tie wire and a bunch of wire ties to get better structural stability. Since it will face water and moisture exposure, I want to use stainless steel rebar tie wire.

Wire ties

The corrosion can spread into areas where the epoxy coating remains intact, making it harder to diagnose the areas that need repair

I understand that building materials are often outlawed after decades of widespread use, often growing out of a former misunderstanding of the safety and danger in long term human exposure. This happened in the late 1980s with the Montreal Protocol and the widespread agreement to outlaw the use of harmful refrigerants and propellants that were causing serious ozone depletion at the time. Nowadays you cannot buy freshly manufactured R22 coolant for air conditioners, only new-old-stock. Most heating and cooling suppliers and businesses will recommend HVAC systems that utilize other, safer forms of refrigerant that don’t deplete the ozone like R22. While not necessarily an environmental concern, epoxy coated rebar is being banned and re-evaluated in a number of areas because of what happens during its application in construction projects. While shown to be amazingly resistant to corrosion during tests, epoxy coated rebar tie wire will only perform as designed if it is handled with extreme care and diligence. But the reality is that during packaging and handling, knicks and burs the size of pin holes will form in the epoxy coating, which will let moisture seap inside and corrode the metal from underneath. The corrosion can spread into areas where the epoxy coating remains intact, making it harder to diagnose the areas that need repair. There are other options these days for corrosion-resistant rebar tie wire. Various gauge galvanized, stainless steel, and black annealed steel rebar tie wire are available for a number of different building applications. While epoxy coated rebar tie wire might not be banned in your area, you might want to consider other options for long term structural stability.

 

Rod wire made in USA

I moved to the ocean after years of living up north and subjecting myself to worsening winter freezes.

Temperatures at negative thirty degrees fahrenheit are no joke, especially when the wind chill is even colder than that.

I asked myself how much more of this I could subject myself to before losing my mind of freezing to death some winter because I become incapable of keeping the house warm enough through spring. Even with this very-real possibility in the forefront of my mind, it took me a number of years to at last convince myself that I should sell my house and buy a beach condominium somewhere down south. I was worried that all of the condos for sale down south are made with foreign materials that aren’t certified domestic or made in the USA. However, I found an amazing building company that marketed their American-made philosophy above and before anything else. They talked about using certified domestic concrete and steel rebar tie wire in the condo buildings that they construct. Their American-made steel rebar tie wire is galvanized and rust-resistant, making it ideal for coastal construction applications like beach condominiums. They spent years finding the best steel rebar tie wire manufacturers before choosing the certified domestic dealer they operate with currently. It makes me feel better about throwing my money into a condo if I know that the building isn’t going to crumble with me inside of it randomly in the middle of the night. I want to know that it’s going to last for all of the years that I intend on living inside of it.

 

Forming wire made in USA

It’s always hard when you sign leases on apartments that get sold while your contract is still active.

• You are six months into your annual lease and suddenly you are renting from a new company altogether, often one that is seeking to run the same business with lower operating costs to squeeze what little profit out they can in the short term.

Then they sell the apartments to a different company that tries to do the same exact thing. But since they simply honor the terms of your existing lease in the short term, it’s just a waiting game for them until your lease expires and you’re at the receiving end of an increasingly unfair negotiation process. They always want to increase the cost of rent while adding useless and unnecessary rolls in the proces. And when they need to make fixes, repairs, or upgrades to the buildings, units, or grounds, I just shake my head. They got the cheapest and most poorly-rated asphalt company in this whole town to reseal and resurface our parking lot. Despite several residents bringing this up with the property managers, they went forward with hiring this dubious company. Just like we expected, they did a terrible job and it’s already cracking again not 12 months later. Recently they decided to replace some of the cracked and broken sidewalks but they did it cheaply. I told them to use steel rebar in the concrete to give it more stability and prevent future dcracking. It doesn’t cost that much money to buy a coil of rebar tie wire and a handful of wire ties to get that part of the job done.

 

Ironworker wire

My friend Michelle has been an artist her entire life, but she hasn’t always stuck with the same medium.

• While she prefers handcrafted visual art these days, she was a budding young musician and poet in college.

She just happened to be brilliant at ceramics after sculpting with clay in her early childhood with her parents and siblings. I encouraged her to take a sculpting class in college because I assumed it would involve clay, but the instructor tried to approach every other possible medium through which one could make sculptures beyond the traditional ceramic clay that most people are already exposed to. First it was cardboard, which Michelle took to immediately to my utter bewilderment and surprise. She loved the idea of repurposing old cardboard that would otherwise end up in the landfill after foraging behind industrial buildings on the other end of town. However, it was metal sculpting that inspired Michelle more than anything else. The instructor had coils of highly flexible, galvanized steel rebar tie wire and wire ties to use for making things as trivial as coffee tables and as wild as abstract sculptures. One of our friends used the rebar bent into geometrical shapes that he would weld together, making these massive multi-sided forms that resembled dodecahedrons. Michelle used the skills to open a furniture crafting business using primarily rebar tie wire of various kinds and sizes, between 14 gauge and 18 gauge. Most of her furniture is made with stainless steel rebar tie wire because of its long term stability. She also uses galvanized steel rebar tie wire in addition to the stainless steel rebar tie wire.

 

16g galvanized double loop ties

Before I moved into this area, I was used to having very little precipitation throughout the year.

In the winter the temperatures hovered in the high 30s and only snowed every now and then.

As far as rain was concerned, that was almost always confined to the late summer months, with perhaps a few thunderstorms here and there in the spring and autumn seasons as well. I miss those years because I was able to play outdoors with my friends for most of the summer without getting rained on and having to move our activities indoors like so many kids prefer these days. I actually enjoyed being outside playing street hockey and soccer with my friends on the weekends and during daylight hours when we got home from school. While I don’t have kids yet, I can’t imagine they would appreciate the sort of weather I experience nowadays if they were at all like me in wanting to be outside at that age. In my new environment we have precipitation all year long. Whenever it’s not cold enough for hail or snow, we have on and off rain throughout a good portion of the year. Anyone building with concrete has to take into account the additional moisture that it will be subjected to during its relatively short lifetime getting the same amount of precipitation that other climates experience in a decade by comparison. Concrete is porous and the steel rebar tie wire and the wire ties connecting the rebar tie wire together will inevitably corrode to some degree over long stretches of time. Using galvanized, zinc coated, or stainless steel rebar tie wire will definitely length the lifetime of the rebar tie wire being used and the concrete that it’s holding in place.

 

16 gauge stainless steel tie wire

My first job was at a fruit supplier company.

• I was in the orange and citrus department and loaded massive barrels of fruit every single day at work.

It was an honest living, but I ended up hurting my back during a normal work procedure one afternoon and it put me in the hospital for a few weeks. This left me to wonder whether I really saw myself in the produce industry for the long term future. Not just that, but I wondered if I was really cut out for using my body daily to make a living. I had already demonstrated to myself and my employers that I wasn’t as physically capable of that manual labor as many of my coworkers. I decided to work in the administrative offices for a few years to get white collar job experience, and this led to me getting an even better job several years later at a contractor supply store. I not only work in the office, but I’m the supervisor in charge of all the inventory and stocking for this store and the other one we manage on the other side of town. Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic we faced a slew of supply chain issues like anyone else. There were two products though that not only went into temporary shortages, but also saw natural price increases—wood and metal rebar tie wire. The wood shortage affected the entire building industry, but the rebar supply chain problems were particularly tough for state, city, and county municipalities trying to complete large public projects on time like bridges and causeways. Rebar wire ties were scarce as well, particularly double loop ties and bar ties.

 

Zinc coated Double loop rebar ties