Aluminum Bar Stock

Jim Shaw, EVP of Engineering at Crystal Group, discusses the raw materials Crystal Group uses for their servers.

Video Transcript: Episode 15 – “Aluminum Bar Stock”

Jim Shaw again, here at Crystal Group.  I wanted to spend just a couple of moments talking about some of the base raw materials that we use for constructing our servers, and that is 6000 series aluminum.

We use a couple of different kinds of materials. We use a lot of extrusions that gives us essentially a net to shape product. The way we have designed the server is essentially so you can make it very modular. You can cut it shorter or longer, just depending on whatever it is that you need. We have here in the facility a full machine shop that does nothing but machine aluminums, whether it is in extruded form, or if we walk over here we can see what we have for bar stock too. The aluminum bar stock material again is all 6000 series aluminum, essentially 6061 base materials, so extremely high strength, aircraft grade, strain hardened, structural aluminum. Lots and lots of bar stock here, and essentially we make whatever it is that we need based on what the size and shape is.