From the Web: Unique U.S.-made products; FedEx draws a line; making titanium cheaper; Texas mfg flat

This past Sunday, the Oscar statuettes were handed out at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. These figurines are not your typical mass-produced trophies. Hand-made by the skilled craftsmen of Chicago-based R S Owens, each is made individually, and there is only one mold, which is used for every single Oscar.

The production involves an 10-day process, recently detailed by manufacturingglobal.com. Britannium, a special variant of pewter, is liquefied and poured into the mold. Many processes follow, and the slightest blemish along the way leads to the statuette being scraped and begun from the beginning.

Once the Oscar is finished, it is guaranteed for life. The recipients can send damaged figures back to have them replaced or brought back to their original brilliance. Now that’s a guarantee.

Also made in the U.S. is a line of safes crafted from Damascus-style steel (used most often in knives) that are anything but the traditional, utilitarian safes found in most homes and offices.

In an interview for forbes.com, Shawn Berryhill, vice president of research and development at Brown Safe Manufacturing, the company that makes the product, discussed the Damascus Safe.

Apparently the company culture has a lot to do with its product development. Berryhill said, “It all comes down to one thing: passion. If we simply built safes for pure ergonomics and utility alone, my design team would stage an open revolt, and I’d likely be the one leading it. We’ve chosen to forge our name within an otherwise rather mundane passionless industry.

“…we build products for the selfish pleasure of making them both highly useful, and high design creations. The benefit to our clients is self-evident. One look at this Damascus safe, for example, and it is clearly evident we left the world of simple utility many generations ago.”

Wondering if one of these safes, which start at about $75,000, is right for you? I guess it depends on how refined you are. Berryhill said, “Granted, our safes aren’t for everyone. In truth, most of those people who own standard safes simply lack the refinement to recognize the attention we put into even the subtlest detail of our safes. Our builds appeal to those who have honed the ability to recognize refinement, those who can discern a common wine from a fine wine simply by scent alone. In short, we build these safes to feed our selfish passion, and our aim is to appeal to those clients who possess the ability to recognize and appreciate that passion.”

Special alloys for Oscars. Damascus steel for safes that appeal to a select few. These materials are expensive, and so is titanium, which often is used when low weight and high strength are required and money is no object. Titanium is expensive to produce, but a new manufacturing technique reportedly “could reduce the expense and make the material as useful for cars as it is for fighter jets.”

The various production steps and high-energy requirements in the Kroll process, currently used to make titanium ingots, are what make the process expensive.

SRI International has developed a new process that uses plasma arcs to cut out some of the steps necessary in the Kroll process and deliver a titanium powder that, supposedly, could be more useful for many applications.

The powder can be pressed into a shape that’s roughly comparable to the final product and fused. Using high temperatures, the metal then is formed into a rough-cut shape that can then be neatened up with further machining. Indeed, that’s similar to the way titanium powder currently is used in laser-sintering 3-D printers.

FedEx is taking some heat from a U.S. company that makes a product the carrier refuses to ship.

Arstechnica.com has reported that FedEx won’t ship Defense Distributed’s CNC mill—dubbed the “Ghost Gunner,” that makes homemade metal semi-automatic rifles.

“I've got an account with another courier, but FedEx is bewildering because the reason I started with them in the first place was their [National Rifle Association] advantage program,” the company’s founder, Cody Wilson, told Ars by text message.

Wilson said FedEx will almost certainly lose his business. He also said, “The thing is I bet UPS will blackball me as well and I'll have to smuggle the damn thing out of my own city,” adding that to date he has sold “around 1,200” of the devices, and that he “can’t keep up with demand.”

Business is not as brisk for manufacturers in Texas. Still feeling the effects of falling oil prices, manufacturers throughout the state have reported flat activity for the second consecutive month in a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“We are very much affected by the crash in oil prices,” a fabricated metal manufacturer said in the survey. “At the beginning of the month there was a wave of projects that were either cancelled or placed on hold by the customer.”

One survey respondent reported that his employer laid off a quarter of its workforce due to slowing demand, and another metal manufacturer said he had experienced a “rapid decline” in orders over the last 30 days and that business was down 30 percent for the month.