Coming motor oil shortage

A friend manages a local Wally World auto shop. He also orders stock for several depts.

His 15w40 diesel oil is gone, like Jimmy Hoffa's loot, like Frank Sinatra and his mom.  Bare shelves, and no more coming in the foreseeable months. Similar situation brewing for gasser oil but not hitting yet.

Dropped by NAPA today for a Bully carb part.  Overhead them sell their last 15 quarts of Motorcraft diesel oil. I have about 10 gallons of good synth gasser oil on hand.

I have 20 gallons of T6 on hand and about 30 of T4.  Just had a hunch, a couple months ago, when TSC started running out of both. So I searched and stocked up.  55 gal barrels of T4 are going for $1k on the web.

Para bellum, gents.  They don't want us driving.

I hadn't really seen that with oil (in my case Supertech Synthetic)... But my goodness finding genuine Motorcraft FL1A filters was a pain last month. Only place with them locally was the darned expensive AZ ($9 for the thing!)... I literally bought the only one in the county! A few days later on the trip I took to PA I luckily found one single one in stock at a Walmart in Columbus, OH (the more reasonable $4-$5 I'm used to paying ).

Both of my trucks use them... and aside from premium brands (wix, K&N, royal purple, etc.) I insist on Motorcraft filters... there is no better bang for the buck. When you can find them at Walmart, that is.

The global supply chain is (still) a locked up mess... raw materials can be difficult to source which is what I suspect the issue is; Ford built engines using that filter all the way through 2011/2012 (4.0 V6) so I doubt they're discontinued. Also most of the other motorcraft filters were also slim pickings. And filters in general.

I can't divulge details, but where I work we use a lot of steel coil (for pressing into stampings and rolling/welding into pipe)... several have been various degrees of difficult to obtain regularly... for some of our tubing coils for a particular application we actually had to get approval to add a different supplier and even then, a couple of particular coils are particularly known for being trouble in recent months. The steel has to be made (or melted from scrap), then rolled into a wide/large master coil (usually in the same plant), but then it has to be cut ("slit") to the final width at the correct size which is often in a second mill... and either before or after other processing performed (coatings, etc.). Which as an end user of finished coils makes for many places that the chain can fail (plant delay, shipping delay, etc.)

I suspect this may be what's happening with the filter industry. If not steel, pick any of the raw materials that go into it. Paint's been another issue with our customers (auto makers)... for a while there was a global titainium dioxide shortage, and such is needed for most paints (it's the white substance that made lead paint obsolete). We don't do much painting in house (only for a select few parts that get painted black) but if our customers can't make finished cars, they don't buy parts, and everything screeches to a grinding halt. Good thing I'm the equipment engineer and not the purchasing guy... bad time to have his job!