I once watched a distributor lose a good order because he could not answer a simple question. His customer, a cylinder rebuilder, asked what base steel and chrome thickness a batch of rod was, and the distributor did not know, because he had never really read the mill certificate that came with it.
A stockist in a humid coastal port once opened a bundle of honed tube for me that had been sitting in his warehouse for eight months. From the outside the tubes looked fine, but when we capped-off and looked inside the bore, there was a dull bloom of surface rust running the length of several tubes.
The first time a new reseller calls us, the question is almost always the same: "What diameters and lengths should I actually keep on the shelf?" It is the right question, because chrome plated rod ties up more capital per meter than honed tube, and a straight, mirror-finished rod that gets dinged o
