Nylon Bushing

[Blue Chips 669]

2 hours ago, WHX?? said:

4 hours ago, Blue Chips said:

McMaster isn't always the cheapest source,

I think they are ... on hardware And they have EVERYTHING  it's the shipping that bones ya. 

 

I don't know how many orders I've placed with McMaster-Carr over the past 35 years, but extrapolating from the past 4+ years, I'd guestimate at least 1,500.

 

My needs are probably different from a lot of people. The restoration/repair work that I do on vintage/antique machines and vehicles sometimes requires specialty fasteners or other hardware that can be very hard to locate, and some of those items are either unavailable from McMaster-Carr or might be cheaper from another source. As another example, I occasionally buy a small quantity of raw metal stock (bar, sheet, rod, wire, etc.) from McMaster, usually when I'm in a big rush, but I can often get raw metal stock cheaper elsewhere. That said, I buy 'most' of my fasteners and common hardware items from McMaster, and the unit price is typically very reasonable, particularly when items are sold in quantities like 10, 25, 50, or even 100.

 

One factor that can lower the 'effective' price of items from McMaster-Carr is time savings. They have an excellent online catalog that's well organized, easy to search, and easy to filter search results, so I can usually find what I'm looking for in a minute or two instead of spending a lot of time shopping around on the Internet, paging through printed catalogs, or making lots of phone calls. IF time is money to you, then there's a big potential savings there. And if I need additional details about a product, I can usually get a response in minutes from customer service, including things like .pdf files of factory spec sheets. Fast shipping provides another time savings, and as mentioned, the shipping cost per line item goes way down IF you include several line items in one order, which typically doesn't raise the shipping cost, since they usually all come in one box if it's coming from one location.  

 

 

Edited 49 minutes ago by Blue Chips

[squonk 45,404]

Time is money. If you can wait a week or more have at it. McMaster contracts with UPS. They have a UPS terminal right at the whare house in NJ. and the trucks usually leave twice a day. Their customer service is better than Grainger if you have to call. When I needed all those belts I asked how many do you have and the guy responded with something like 28 of them. Half of the time Grainger stuff comes from the middle of the country or has to ship from their supplier which takes days. 

[Handy Don 15,774]

For anyone using CAD software, McMaster lets you import detailed 3D models (in several different formats) of their products directly into your software (I use Autodek Fusion).This has saved me tons of time and vastly improved my modeling.