Steel Shortage after WW2

[Vanin]

I was wondering why there was a steel shortage after WW2 which forced companies like Aston Martin to make their engines from aluminium and other companies to make their bodywork in aluminium. Surely there would have been tons of scrap tanks, ships and weapons around.

[Vanin]

Vaud said:

A fairly balanced article here exploring the topic:
http://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/railing...

I must say from a relatively innocent question this thread has come up with a mine of information,

Thanks to all, but this link from Vaud was

interesting as it seems that all the railings and scrap collected during the war was more than could be dealt with and a lot of it was sent to the

bottom of the sea.

My Gt uncle had a Morser howitzer on the edge of one of his fields. It was a trophy from WW1 and old folk in the village claimed that they

could get inside the barrel when they were kids, but it was taken for scrap in WW2 so probably at the bottom of the North Sea now.

I appreciate things were very difficult just after the war, but you would have thought that things would have settled by the time Tadek Marek

started to build his six cylinder engine for Aston. in1954/5/6

[Vanin]

Going back to my original point about Tadek Marek and the 6 cylinder. I have always understood that iron was not available in 1956 to make the blocks for Aston. Jaguar managed to pull a few strings to find their iron, so I do not think that it was the lower melting point of the aluminium that was the factor here.
There were many problems with the crankshaft expending at a different rate to the alloy blocks causing loss of oil pressure only cured by upping the oil pressure to over 100psi when hot, so it was not an easy move and I am sure that they would have preferred iron to alloy at that time.

[Vanin]

Vaud said:

techiedave said:

That's why they look for sunken ships. They can use the steel and also its not been contaminated by some types of radiation as the seas protected it from it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Indeed - it is a real issue.

Now that is very interesting. Back in 2000 I did a log cabin course with a wild man from the backwoods of Devon. I thought that we were going to be using chainsaws, but not a bit of it. It was mainly hand tools, draw knives, chisels, adzes and axes. We were taught how to sharpen them all properly and the result was a really frighteningly sharp tool which you had to handle like gelignite they were so scary.
He spent ages working on the edge, feeling the burr and going on well beyond what I thought was plenty sharp enough. The axes would easily shave all the hair off your arm (skin too if you were not careful!)

He was adamant that the axe had to be made of pre-nuclear steel as something happened to it post Hiroshima. Post nuclear would not give the same edge. We all thought he was nuts, but it seems not looking at that link.
It was amazing to see the chips fly when he was working the axe and also amazing for how long they remained sharp.

[Vanin]

unsprung said:

2xChevrons said:

This is the immediate reason as far as the car industry was concerned. There was a global shortage of steel (due to problems with the coal supply, the industrial ruin of much of Europe, the inevitable delay in switching from wartime to peacetime production and the surviving works being all-but clapped out after six years of running flat-out with minimal maintenance) and the UK's finances were dire. So the Attlee government implemented the 'Export or Die' regime and desperately hawked almost anything that wasn't nailed down in Britain to anyone who would buy it (a big part in why Stafford Cripps gave the USSR the blueprints to the Nene jet engine). Steel was rationed for industrial use. Not only was a lot of the steel itself being sent to Europe but British steel purchasers had to be able to prove that a certain percentage of their output would be going to export and earn foreign exchange. The more exports, the more steel.

This is why Rover created the Land-Rover. The market for posh saloon cars was on its knees, the old Meteor Works in Coventry had been bombed into rubble and Rover had to restart production in the huge and now massively under-utilised Lode Lane factory. Rover had no real export market to speak of so was at the back of the queue for steel. The Land-Rover would be in more demand in the rugged post-war world, would be a good export product, needed relatively little steel itself and would earn enough Brownie Points at the Ministry of Supply to get Rover the steel it needed to restart saloon production on a big enough scale to make Solihull viable.

The export drive was partly why all the British firms set their sights on America in the late 1940s/early 1950s, plus it was the only market in the world with the money to buy cars then-and-now and no-one in America had been able to buy a new car for six years. Austin and Rootes set up US subsidiaries (Austin even had a skyscraper in New York as its HQ) and you had made-for-America products like the A90 Atlantic and then the Austin-Healey. Morris had over 1000 North American dealers in 1947. With the exception of sports cars none of the British imports had any real success - the Minor, the A40 and the Minx all had brief sales booms but proved to be too fragile and unreliable for American motoring conditions...and then the VW Beetle came along and cleaned up.

As for why America had its post-war boom- billions upon billions of dollars worth of industrial infrastructure had been installed during the war, nearly all of it in the hands of existing major industrial firms. Not only was there five years of war to make good on, but there was also nearly 20 years of Great Depression (finally vanquished by the New Deal and then, ironically for what is considered the boom time of American capitalism, state intervention and funding on a scale that would have made Lenin proud). There was the perfect mix of a lot of new technology to exploit, a lot of infrastructure to repair, huge industrial investment and resources and millions of GI Bill-receiving servicemen ready to settle down, get a job and start spending on a scale that the world had never seen before. And all this in the only major economy of the world completely untouched by war and in fact in much better economic health in 1945 than it had been in 1939.

photographs and long text I almost never quote in full on PH

I'm making an exception for this highly-informative and well-written examination by 2xChevrons

sod the car talk; I'd come to PH daily for this combination of history, culture and economics

thank you

I'll second that, thanks to all.