Steel Strip stuff and a week from Hell

Firstly, anyone who visits’ my blog regularly may have noticed a distinct lack of postings recently.

This is due largely to the lack of a working computer and internet collection. The sorry saga started with a massive influx of spam emails which were infected with the WS32 sober virus. As far as I was aware none of these had infected my machine thanks to a “belt and braces” approach, where virus checking is enabled at my ISP and then checked again locally on all incoming mails by AVG. However the fact that many were reaching me with spurious addresses i.e. xyz@steelstrip.co.uk etc. prompted me to call my ISP who was confident that my machine was infected!

Despite checking and rechecking my machine with AVG and standalone tools from Symantec and McAfee reporting no infection, I decided that as it was probably time to format and reinstall anyway, so the die was cast!

After backing up all my data and checking that I had all my original disks and registration details available I finally pressed OK, blinked at the warnings and within a few minutes my C drive was empty. It was a few hours later that I was to make the mistake that through me into computer chaos for the following week, I installed service pack 2 (

Now despite all the “pundits” saying that Service pack 2 is a “must” and the best thing since Marmite and bacon butties, my hardware configuration does not like it and won’t play.

Anyway one week on and more driver downloads and reconfigurations than I care to recall, service pack 2 is gone and my PC is behaving impeccably being generally nice and wants’ to have my babies. Goodbye SP 2 have a nice life.

I have quickly gone through the news of the past week getting up to speed on steel strip related stuff and spotted the following worthy of a read:-

EU mills have announced price increases of between €20 and €30 per tonne for deliveries of strip mill products in the first quarter of 2006 as reported my MEPS, but I am inclined to agree with their opinion that it will be difficult to enforce. They forecast that whilst North American prices are likely to remain stable for the near future, continued overproduction in the East poses a threat to future price stability.

The Stelco debacle continues, but my friend Michael over at Stampingoutaliving, is better informed than I am if you want to check it out.

A lot of my working life has been involved with Pressworkers, so I was intrigued to spot that the ever alert Mr. Whitehouse over at the Tinbasher has spotted plans for a do it yourself home press brake, if you decide on it as a Christmas holiday project, just watch the fingers and don’t operate it in the nude.