BUYING STEEL TUBE FOR FABRICATION

What you need to know before you go to the steel store

Structural steel tube is widely used in off-road fabrication because it offers high strength relative to weight. But buying steel and steel tubing for your 4x4 project can be daunting and expensive to those who haven’t done it before. Sure, you can grab a 3- to 4-foot length of mild steel at the local hardware outlet store, but you’ll pay out the nose for it (relatively speaking), and 3 to 4 feet of steel doesn’t go far when it comes to building an off-road rig. And is it even the best kind of steel for you to use? Eventually, once you’ve started fabricating your own parts out of steel and other metals, you’ll want to explore your local metal distributor. Here is a rundown on some basic information you will need to know before you head to the metal store to help you with this step in the fabrication process.

Steel Tubing vs. Pipe

A solid bar of steel is incredibly strong, but also very heavy. The fact is that forming a steel plate into a hollow, round, or square tube (or even just adding a bend or two) makes it quite a bit stronger to torsion (twisting) and bending while also being lighter weight than a similar piece of solid steel. We call this tubing. Sure, you may be tempted to call it a pipe, but the pipe is for containing fluids and gases, and the pipe isn’t nearly as strong as a real structural tube because of chemical and manufacturing differences.