Welcome back! Still planning to build a Haynes chassis with Miata running gear?
Just what I need...ANOTHER local builder that will have their car on the road before me!
To Tom's point, everybody building with RHS tubing as called out in the books are building with hot rolled. It is a proven material with more than sufficient strength for a reasonably well designed tube frame chassis. Along those lines, make sure the steel you're getting is cleaned of mill scale ("pickled"?) and oiled.
Mill scale sucks.Also I thought that Online Metals will let you order sizes for will-call that are not shown online too, since they don't have to meet shipping requirements. For instance, most tube comes in 20 or 24 foot lengths from the mill. I recall them stating that if you ordered in 'half' lengths, or maybe it was pairs of 'half' lengths (full stick total lengths with a single cut charge), that the per unit length price came down a little bit further yet. Don't quote me on that though, as I got my steel from Everett Steel, because they are close to my house and open on Saturdays. Yeah, I was lazy like that. I should have gone with Online Metals from the start, since some of it has had
mill scale, and my whole last batch of it somehow measures out 1 gauge thinner (17 vs 16) than advertised...Which I figured out
after using it for a large portion of my cockpit.