Amazon was such a great, terrible invention. You can order a near-endless number of items that can be delivered to your home by tomorrow. But what if you’re an engineer? As it turns out, they have a sort of Amazon, too, and it’s fascinating. Thank reader JP15 for the “engineer’s Amazon” idea!
Jason wrote about the little cutie known as Personnel Carrier 6794N11. It’s a $7,214.99 personal mobility doohickey to scoot people around a factory or wherever. Now that’s silly, but what’s very serious is where the scooter came from, and it’s the McMaster-Carr Supply Company. MMC was founded in 1901 in Chicago, and its entire business is supporting other businesses with darn near anything an engineer or a factory might want to order. How effective is McMaster-Carr? Our readers have some incredible stories. Parsko:
The thing you are missing is the source. I’ve been shopping there over 15 years. Things are a premium because factories and engineers need it tomorrow, and they absolutely deliver. I’ve had a 1000lb surface plate in my lab next day. When you shop here, price is typically disregarded.
And, as said below, they are always in stock, or have an option that works. The search engine is amaze-balls, and like muscle memory for me.
Professor Chorls:
People who don’t regularly shop at McMaster really are missing out on how ethereally fast they are at delivering.
I’ve personally helmed a 130 or 140 line item order submission on a Thursday evening. We essentially ordered everything to build a device from scratch over the weekend for a surprise demonstration/show event for the company. The design wasn’t even done yet Friday at 1PM when the UPS guy woke us up in the conference room.
This was a delivery to Boston, from their New Jersey warehouse. That means it went out at 0700 sharp, got to Somerville distro around lunchtime, and they threw it at us the next town over afterwards.
Working with a lot of industrial suppliers is like pulling fingernails (like have you ever seen sprockets sorted by OUTER DIAMETER, NOT NUMBER OF TEETH?) but McM’s big swinging value-add sack is how systematic and predictable they are.
My only problem with them is now I live 10 minutes from the Atlanta distro center and I treat their Will-Call counter as a hardware store and this is costing me my financial stability.
Woah! That’s incredible. Oh no, please don’t send me down a rabbit hole!
Matt wrote about how Chrysler’s been through about a million revivals over the years and that Stellantis isn’t doing so hot right now. He used Office Space references throughout, and our readers delivered. A. Barth:
People can get automotive news anywhere, okay? They come to The Autopian for the atmosphere and the attitude. Okay? That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.
Bronco2CombustionBoogaloo:
Jason Torchinsky, for example, has 37 pieces of flair… and a terrific smile.
Finally, Jason gave us a Cold Start featuring a VW New Beetle and a space shuttle. My Other Car is a Tetanus Shot:
NASA got a lot pickier with use of their brand after the release of the Oscar-winning film Armageddon, because the sheer cinematic genius and award-winning character study prowess of Michael Bay was just something NASA couldn’t compete with.
Zeppelopod:
NASA’s budget had been shrinking for years. It’s well known that they were able to hire Stanley Kubrick to film the moon landing AND do it on-location.
Have a great evening, everyone.
(Topshot: McMaster-Carr)
For engineers, the biggest business most they have is not really the fast shipping ; it’s that McMaster Carr allows you to download a CAD model of nearly every single part they sell directly from their website. No more calling some warehouse in a podunk town asking for CAD, or having to buy a sample and model it yourself. You just decide you need a spring or a screw or a bearing or anything else, drop it into your assembly, and then when it comes time to buy the materials to make your prototype what are you going to do? Try to nickel and dime your build cost down by finding parts that seem close from other suppliers and risk them not meeting your spec in some crucial way, or just pay the extra from the piece of mind that the part you bought will work?
I love McM Carr, Allied Electronics. But I very much miss SmallParts.com, one of the greatest online parts sites ever. RIP SmallParts.
I think I only have needed Smallparts once or twice, but, they were indeed very good. Is there anything that has taken their place?
Mcm is amazing and I can’t (for nda reasons) tell you how much of early development hardware on certain rockets I’ve spent considerable time working on were made using mcm hardware. They are all flight qualified hardware now for flight but development hardware still gets mcm hardware from time to time
If McM finally starts selling kit houses we will finally have a replacement for the Sears Catalog.
If you’re into tiny houses, you could weatherproof this one for outdoors. Includes lighting.
Houses, 12 Feet x 8 Feet x 20 Feet Overall Size, 3 Windows
https://www.mcmaster.com/6704T998
Shoot, that’s a steal. It’s even insulated!
McMaster appears to still sell landline phones from the 80s. How neat.
And freeze pops too…
McMaster Carr’s HQ is right around the corner from my office, and I often drive past it to get lunch. It’s a huge facility, tucked in between the I-294 Tollway and several large cemeteries. They even appear to be getting their own exit from the Tollway when (if) the construction ever ends.
Ohhh, so THAT’S what they’re doing on County Line.
My first job out of college was for an AS/RS (automated storage and retrieval) company, and I would love to see the systems they have in place.
McMaster is like Amazon in that they have half a billion items. They are unlike Amazon in every other way, fortunately. They have
Easy, accurate searchaccurate descriptionscomplete descriptionsone thing of each type, not 11 under different branding. (There typically is no branding, but customer service will get you that info on request either immediately or within an hour or two, by calling you back, not a text)fantastic customer service (as opposed between no customer service and customer disservice)better availabilitybetter deliveryEvery item is good quality. There is nothing shoddy in their entire stock. Everything meets expectations — those expectations having been set by the complete and accurate descriptions.
Information-wise, McM:Amazon::The Lancet:TikTok
Can you attest to the high quality of the freeze pops they sell?
Damn, I didn’t know they had freeze pops. In the past that would have been more of a Grainger item.
McMaster is awesome. When you make random stuff and need strange parts you can’t find anywhere else, you can usually find it there, often for a very reasonable price, and possibly without ridiculous minimum quantities, though even with the minimum, they can sometimes beat individual unit price somewhere else. It’s just, what do you do with the spares you’ll likely never use? Like, I bought a spring from McM-C to swap out the shitty stock clutch pedal spring in my GR86. I had to buy 10 or so, but it still came in about half the price of what some performance car site wanted. The stiffness was slightly different, but what i have is perfect for what it is.
You sell the other 9 to folks on the GR86 forums, that’s what you do.
It’s not worth the trouble minus the cost of shipping.
I place 3 or 4 McMaster orders in a day sometimes. My company makes it super easy, which is good when you work R&D.
The main downside between them and Grainger is that McMaster typically doesn’t list the brand on their website. However, their phone support is excellent (at least if you are a large corporate customer).
I have not found a retailer with a better indexed search than McMaster. I’ll even go there before digikey/mouser for electronics because it is so much easier to find what you want.
My work has been in mechanical, but I’ve done some in electrical and wonder — I generally see Digikey and Mouser mentioned, but not Newark, which I think of as equivalent. Is there a difference?
Another awesome thing about McMaster Carr for rapid prototyping is that they typically have 3D CAD models of most of their catalog items. McMaster-Carr is worth every penny
This. I’ve even printed things like nuts and connectors from those models if I needed a quick temporary fix.
That’s a huge plus! I often need to know measurements that aren’t usually provided from other vendors.
McMaster Carr – where you order a 6-foot tall set of walk-over stairs with a platform that gets delivered next-day. It’s the industrial fix-in-a-pinch.
Back in the pre-internet days my uncle’s tool and die shop had the full McMaster-Carr and Grainger paper catalogs in the office. They made encyclopedias feel inferior. The Grainger one had a big splash image on the cover when it made it to 2 million items available.
He also had Fastenal, but it was a relative afterthought. Seems like they’ve picked up substantially since, but that may be colored by our town only having that as a physical location.
McMaster’s paper catalogue brings back memories.
But then there’s Misumi. It’s a next-level industrial savior.
OMFG, did you want to manufacture proper tooling and equipment? They can get you 95% of the way out of one-stop.
Misumi is amazing also. Tooling parts, but parameterized to be built to your spec and still delivered pretty quickly. It allows you basically to use their machine shop instead of your own, and allows someone without a machine shop to get custom parts without doing the CAD and then quoting vendors.
I absolutely refuse to give up my printed McMaster-Carr catalogs. Hopefully my house never burns down. When you have a vague idea about, yeah I once saw a thing that looks like it could work here, you can thumb through the catalog and find a dozen things that will work. Their website/app has gotten very good and you can flip electronic catalog pages, but it just isn’t the same.
If it was a tool and die shop, there was a Carr-Lane catalog there, too. Green cover, IIRC.
Carr-Lane and Norelem.
Funny enough both green covered books.
I mean I just ordered a bunch of stuff from McMaster Carr this week. It’s truly the best. Also the industrial designer’s dream site!
Let me be the first to say the bearing you need is $200 while the same size but 10x too strong it’s $2.
I was shopping for a 65mm low profile wrench yesterday, found it for $65. They had a 2-9/16” one otherwise exactly the same for $45 (would just as well for the application). Bought the 65mm one anyway.
The wrench was also more expensive than the part I needed it for, but you pay what it costs when you need it tomorrow.
Yeah, one’s brain sonetimes just doesn’t want to deal with an annoying jumble of numbers & punctuation (2-9/16″) especially when one knows a nice round number (65mm) exists without any fuss.
That does happen. I assume it’s based on some combination of their order quantities, the vendor they used, and customer orders. But you can definitely sometimes find the black Grade 5 steel screw you need at $0.47 each, the stainless version of same for the reasonably higher $0.68, and the surprise Grade 8 black one for only 10/$3. I’m guessing because they recently had an order for 20k pieces, and bought 40k to have backup stock.