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)
We always called it McMaster Race-Carr. It was the source for brass check valves that worked great as boost controllers, manifolds to re plumb your vacuum lines, heim joints to improve rod shifter linkage. Being into cars that didn’t have much of an aftermarket they were my source for performance parts.
Hang on… Am I reading this right in that you’re selecting check valves with specific cracking pressures and piping that into the wastegate to limit your boost?
The tried and true is an adjustable valve, but we have used multiples of those and some solenoid valves to enable a low boost/high boost setting.
https://www.mcmaster.com/48935k25/ is the style. Add a barb to both ends and drill a tiny bleed hole on the wastegate side and it’s a reliable boost controller, shorten the body to increase pressure.
The nickname in the Turbo-Mopar community is Granger valve because people originally got them through Granger, but McMaster car was ultimately a more popular source since they were easier to buy from.
based and mcmasterpilled
Let’s, so if we see someone wearing McMaster-Carr and Hydrox flair, that’s the secret code for Autopian readers?
Maybe also one of:
Koito Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Japan):
Valeo (France):
Forvia Hella (Germany):
Marelli (Italy):
Because taillights.
How could anyone not know of McMaster-Carr? The bookmark folder named “suppliers” on my browser has Amazon at the top, and McM-C immediately beneath it. Stop buying cheap Chinese crap metallurgy off Amazon, and get your nuts and bolts from McM-C! You’ll be happier when your vehicle doesn’t separate at high speeds in a mountain corner.
Besides, they’ll have what you need when Amazon looks at you like you are a tropical plant for asking.
Sure they got Kubrick for the moon landing. But that was old school. Where are the car crashes, the celebrity cameos, the explosions, and the reality show drama? Kubrick is so boomer.
Didn’t I teach y’all nothin’ when I wrote 27,000 words about how I built half my truck from McMaster-Carr
My late father was an engineer. I still have loads of McM plastic bags with stuff that have been around as long as I can remember.
Way back when I was in high school, I was on a FIRST robotics team that was fortunate enough to have a benefactor who worked at McMaster. We’d piece together our wish list and he’d deliver it all himself the next day. We all called him Santa.
Nowadays the industry I work in precludes ordering from McMaster, but I still peruse their site on a regular basis as a sanity check to see if a piece of hardware I need exists. Because if it does, they’re almost guaranteed to have it.
I volunteer as a judge for a FIRST Robotics regional event every season. It’s an amazing experience. I was not fortunate enough to have something cool like that when I was in school. I’m sure it would have helped me enjoy school more if it existed back then.
Back before electricity McMaster’s catalog was like 4 inches thick. Great night shift reading!
Remember it was like Christmas when they came out with a catalog on CD!
Back in the day our McM catalogs had tab markers to all of the common it’s we purchased.
McM online search works pretty good. And they have a lot of the odd sized fasteners that local supplier doesn’t stock and you need pronto.
The website design is also very clever. A lot of back end tricks to make the website load as fast as possible. https://youtu.be/-Ln-8QM8KhQ?si=pDEUOiSjZ1SedASq
In the age of TikTok, it’s still 4 inches thick. Actually I think it’s more now….
Yeah, I have a paper catalog from there both on my work and home bookshelves. If you don’t know what something is called, this is a fantastic resource to browse-through until you find it.
The pricing isn’t bad, especially since you can often buy just as much as you need, and are not required to buy 50 of something. That said, sometimes it’s cheaper just to buy 50 tiny screws.
Just the time I save trying to find such obscure mechanical thingamadoodles makes it worth buying from there.
I sent a link to a friend and he pointed out the cart in the first picture is one he now has.
The body seems indestructible.
Usually if the local Ace doesn’t have an oddly specific fastener then McMaster is my go-to. Also their cad downloads have been a lifesaver for work and personal projects. They even sell Freeze pops 🙂
Well Ace is really a reseller of Hillman mostly https://shop.hillmangroup.com/
McMaster’s great if you need a really specific faster.
Well, more like if you need 25-200 of them depending on the fastener. Zoro can be good for smaller quantities, but their categorization system sucks and you have to just use their search.
When I had my RS6 converted to a 6 speed, my mechanic’s shit-show shop lost my 12M x 125mm stainless shouldered bolt that held the starter through the block and tranny. So one of his gorillas used a different, smaller diameter bolt with 15! Yes! 15 fender washers on it to make up the difference. Of course the torque of the starter walked it away from the flywheel gear leaving me stranded in a low parking garage while visiting my dying mother at the hospital. I looked at every auto parts store, home center, etc. for days. Ace had the exact bolt plus others in several lengths, diameters, etc.
Will McMaster Carr still not sell to me because I don’t use $100000 worth of wing nuts and aerospace grade adhesives per year?
On the other hand, Grainger is getting more competitive.
If you like catalogs, have you seen the Thomas book of manufacturers?
I think it’s the other way around for us, McMaster has not trouble selling to us small users, but Grainger doesn’t.
Grainger used to do that, but last few years has encouraged small purchases.
McMaster Carr wouldn’t even sell me a catalog when their customers kept recommending them for items I needed.
I’m trying to buy some specialized Henkel Loctite epoxy to repair a plastic radiator now. Napa has been strong on Henkel products, but no luck this time.
I’m in a smaller city now, and haven’t found a full line industrial distributor here so far.
I’ll be happy if McMaster Carr is easier to work with now.
My old line distributors closed one by one in the larger city I was in.
Grainger and Fastenal were stepping into the gap, but Grainger had smaller minimums. That was not the case in the past.
Many distributors raised their minimums drastically, then shut down soon after.
I don’t think there are any minimums to make a McMaster account and order from them. In fact, I was able to order on Net 30 invoicing without so much as a credit check.
Grainger is fine but their search and sort functionality is archaic by comparison. Platt has better pricing but has almost nothing in stock.
I’ll try them again.
Big change in attitude from the past.
In some areas, Grainger has been great at finding products no one else has.
I was looking for better tool wraps and holders.
Grainger had a number of inexpensive options, then at a higher price, a tool wrap that had all the usual flaws cured.
Seemed very overpriced until I looked at the details.
I’ve been ordering from them as an individual for about 25 years, mostly small orders.
I have no explanation.
I offered to pay for a catalog, no to that.
I was told I’d have to buy through one of their customers if I wanted something exclusive.
It’s probably been more than 25 years since I bought anything from them.
Maybe it’s a regional variation? I’m not far from Boston. Could also be that I am not remembering something about the early process. I got my catalog from work, so I didn’t request one and if they asked for a company name and PO, I would have just made something up. Ordering online now, though, I just order like from anywhere else.
There was no local warehouse, so I was calling the company.
Didn’t occur to me to use my company name. Sometimes it matters.
The interwebs have changed a lot of business practices.
I used McMaster Carr for parts for my mechanical engineering senior project 17 years ago. One of the easiest places to order just a few specialized bolts with a credit card, and not requiring a PO.
I’ll definitely have to add them to my active list.
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?
MPJA has been great for surplus electronics and some electrical.
I was routinely searching for a specialty lock originally out of Europe.
Finally found the French source, but not practical to import.
Found some from a salvage business, turns out they literally had zero information on item, and wouldn’t part any out, so I now have the original stock from the importer in the original packaging it was imported in!
I needed two!
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
I love finding unusual items and trying to figure out why they exist, like stainless steel Velcro.
I have a theory, bolstered because it is only offered by the mile.
Easy to go down a fogbank rabbit hole.
Stainless steel Velcro is both amazing and enough to make a nun curse. That stuff will tear your hands up!
They sent me a sample and it looked and felt like nylon. All black.
I had to put a torch to it to prove it.
Oh nice! The stuff I used to deal with was almost gold and would scratch and stab you
Possible they smoothed the cut ends.
I was baffled when I got it.
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!
No floor though. The insulation is just to cut down factory noise a bit. I also doubt that the roof is rated for snow load.
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.
Yup, if you look on Google Earth there are stub ramps visible. Looks like on and off of southbound 294.
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.
A church in Memphis asked for their own freeway exit.
Dot said sure, and sent them a bill.
They did not get their own exit.
That happens here with bridges. IDOT says “here’s the gray concrete version, and here’s the option with decorative stamping, textures, and paint.”
Most of the towns around here go for the option, but $$$$$$$ goes out the window.
By all accounts it’s a great place to work.
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 have suggested that if you want something not produced, order ONE from China and next year it will be in mass production. (I have seen this!)
I searched for spare parts that should be available and nothing anywhere, except oem.
Next time I went on Amazon, there they were!
Interesting. Are they real products?
I believe they are.
I got a countertop oven missing most of the trays, and the company wanted insane money to replace them.
Shouldn’t be hard for Amazon to obtain some.
I suspect many people lose these.
I do plan on ordering them.
I knew a guy that ordered the first addressable individual tricolor LED strings out of China for a darpa project using crude video screens for a camouflage project exploiting light masking.
Shhhh!
Next year I think they were retailed.
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?
Can’t answer that, but digikey has offered basic engineering advice essentially for free.
Digikey, Mouser, Newark (Farnell, element 14 for Europe and Asia, all bought by Avnet) and now Arrow Electronics will all take credit card orders from individuals, not sure on the minimum orders as I’m ordering on Net 30 for work so I don’t have to worry about that. Mouser and Digikey have the better web searches and drill down menus, as well as web tutorials and other free advice.
I think of Newark as similar, but not quite on the same usefulness level as Mouser and Digikey. Arrow and Avnet are much more geared mainly towards the electronics industry instead of also to hobbyists.
One very good tool for searching for electronic parts by manufacturer part number is findchips.com, helps narrow down who has stock and at what price. Octopart.com can also be useful, but I find it leads to more possibly sketchy sources that may or may not really have the part.
McMaster Carr is truly amazing. Grainger and Zoro Tools (same ownership) are also useful but not quite as awesome in my experience.
Thanks.
Useful stuff.
May have been Newark I ordered from once.
Prices and quality were fine, but I had to pay up front in person, then wait for it to come in, then pick up at their location.
I was buying from a superior tool catalog until they were sold and seemed to vanish.
Everything from precision measuring devices, carpentry, SK tools, very deep selection. A lot of European brands.
I think their search is just less robust? My company has them on our “express buy” program (along with McMaster, Digikey, mouser, grainger) which makes ordering quick and easy. I usually only go to them when I know the specific item I want, and they’re either the only source out of those options, or the best price.
Thanks, all.
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.
Totally agree about analog catalogs!
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.
Fastenal seems to carry much more now.
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.
I work with machines that are either all metric, or some weird mixture of metric and ANSI. Not unlike cars. Switching between systems is second nature, but I cannot use an SAE wrench on a metric nut (or vice versa) it’s just wrong.
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.
McMaster uses many vendors and makes sure they have inventory to quickly replace any item that gets low on stock. They have high service-level requirements, and if you cannot meet them they will find a new vendor. These suppliers often supply other high-volume customers so even a large order from McMaster will not damage their inventories too much. This is especially true for fasteners. Based on my experience with McMaster, they seem to target a really high order fulfillment rate (98%+ for one warehouse, and maybe 99%+ if they look at their warehouse network) for their customers and clearly have determined the safety stock levels to ensure this – based on the supply time and variance from their suppliers and their historical demand patterns. The other thing they do, from my experience, is that they typically have exclusive suppliers for specific parts and categories so if they stop ordering from you it hurts.