It's definitely cyclical, but I wouldn't say seasonal. More kind of flows with the dollar. When the dollar's down, metal's high, and vice-versa. Back during the recession of the mid 80's when the economy was in the tank, metal was sky high. At the time I was doing industrial automation, and had a guy approach me about doing motor control systems for a machine he had invented. It would take a car, shred it, (and I mean SHRED it), float everything from the vehicle down a water bath to float all of the carpet and seat foam and vinyl dash bits out of it leaving nothing but the metal left at the end. This metal all then went through an oven to dry it, and into a furnace to be melted down. His process worked amazingly well, as the metals would separate in the furnace. Iron on the bottom, aluminum on the top, and all other metals in the middle based on their weight. He'd take a batch of four or five cars, melt them down, then tap the furnace one layer at a time. It was ingenious.
I got the control system written and he got the mechanicals perfected, and he started selling these machines. He had guys selling them all over the world, and the orders were piling up like you wouldn't believe. We had people coming from Germany and Japan and Indonesia and anywhere else you could think of to see the prototype in action. Everybody was amazed at how you could take a car and turn it back into base metals that were worth as much as the car was when it was new. He was selling these machines for 5 million bucks each as fast as customers could sign the paper, because based on the price of metal they could recoup their investment in a matter of a few months.
Then the economy started to recover, and the bottom fell out of metals. Before he got his first production machine built, all of the orders he had secured had been canceled. That prototype machine is now a rusted hulk on the back lot of his plant, and he never delivered the first one to a customer. He lost about 30 million bucks in R&D on that project.
