Team aluminum all the way. A higher up where I work is obsessed with stainless steel, he gets these monstrous heavy duty tables made out of SS that hold objects 1/3 of their weight. Makes lab rearranging a nightmare lol.
Aluminum is where it's at, and where it is, is everywhere.
Your cans? Aluminum. Your car? Mostly aluminum. Old wiring, you better believe that's aluminum. Your fucking phone screen is aluminum, sand paper is aluminum, half the birth stones are all aluminum let's fucking goooo baybee
Most cars are still steel. Source I work on cars in New England. So much rust, even on the ones with aluminum bodies, at least wherever it can touch a dissimilar metal and becomes a battery.
And crucially the important parts that keep it from exploding (cylinder liners) and save you in a crash (crumple and bumper cores) are almost all steel. Because it deforms better with simpler engineering.
See also iron brakes in most cars hardened steel bearings everywhere.
Yeah I’m mostly just shitting on it for fun too. But the pistons don’t work very long without steel rings, wrist pins and big end bolts.
The problem is we have to bring copper, brass and other fancy metals in them though, because the all spin on oil cushion bearings. Unless we’re talking Babbitt bushings from the early 1900s.
If you really want to stop the stainless steel obsession, you could start cleaning the benches with bleach and not rinsing again afterwards. The corrosion will set in quickly.