I am increasingly wary of buying things that might be in this category from Amazon.
Amazon does much better then Wal-Mart, but in either case I’ve found the best experience is to only buy products being sold by Amazon or Wal-Mart directly. I love the idea of facilitating small businesses selling through Amazon and Wal-mart, but in practice the feature is just abused by fraudsters, scammers, and disaster profiteers. The few legit sellers on either platform often don’t deal well with customer inquirie…
It's kind of sad that Aliexpress is better in this regard.
The illustrations/photos/images are extremely well done. This sort of consistency and “flattening” of the stile is not trivial at all (the author mentioned the absence of color, but the point of view and shading is also consistent).
Not at all. My rate is very high, so saving a day of my time saves them way more. The burn rate on some of these projects is hundreds of thousands, millions a day. Saving time when your on the critical path (as mechanical design typically is) is worth that much. Once the design is finished there is a whole army of manufacturing engineers and sourcing folks that can drive the cost down. That's not the niche that mcmas…
If it's a commonly used item, it would be much more efficient to pay an entry level CAD guy to draw up a parametric screw part. Add in toolsolids of all the subtracts that the component will do (taps, CBore, clearance), and supplier call outs. It starts to become efficient.
Have you done what you suggested before?
In my experience, the overhead of what you suggest is significant. Leading and instructing an employee or subcontractor, dealing with learning curves, etc. It sounds nice, but the logic in the GP comment is sound (i.e. that spending 2x or 3x the price for what you get can be worth it in most cases).
Mechanical Engineer and product designer here. I've been using mcmaster daily for 20 years to do my job. It is definitely the standard by which all others are judged. I'll gladly pay 2, 3, 5, even 10x the price to get it from McMaster. The service, the CAD models, I have what I need the next day. As an example of the level of their service, you can send them a box of loose parts, no part numbers, no markings, and the…
Alas, for some reason they only cater to the US market and have no presence in the EU, for example. So while it is possible to order from them, it's rather inconvenient as you need to deal with customs/taxes. Digi-Key got this right: you can order DDP, which makes things quick & simple. Incidentally, I am amazed that they don't have a meaningful competitor in the EU. It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s…
and Canada, though only to business and school addresses only.
Amazon is shockingly bad at parametric searches. Products are routinely miscategorized, often ridiculously so, and frequently have missing or woefully inaccurate parameters (like treating a bundle of four 16 GB SD cards as "64 GB"). Even when Amazon's product parameters are correct, their filters are frequently outdated -- for example, their category for "internal hard drives" has a single filter for "4 TB & Above",…
That's because labeling items with attributes and filling them correctly is manual work on behalf of a multitude of 3rd party sellers. Some of them do a decent job, most don't. There are also incentives to completely ignore parametric search and throw as many ads at the customer as possible instead of relevant results.
I wanted to show up with an argument about how third-party sellers were lazy, but I think Amazon can fix this if they want to. If typing "4GB SD card" is parsed by their search engine into "select * from items where storage_capacity='4GB' and product='SD card'", then sellers that don't update their metadata simply won't sell another card ever again. As a result, they will instantly update their data and make sure it's correct. (I suppose "make sure it's correct" is where the plan becomes less clear, given how many fake drives there already are on Amazon. I guess they can figure that out with return rates, but by then a lot of fossil fuels have been squandered and a lot of time has elapsed.)
What's a good place for well priced bolts if I'm not worried about next day shipping but need them to not be made of pot metal?
Bolt Depot? The Voron folks seem to like them, but I haven't ever ordered from them.
I have ordered a large amount of bolts from them, and they're quite good. They don't have McMaster's selection of weirdo stuff (ceramic bolts, titanium bolts, etc), but for your standard Grade 5 / Grade 8 etc, they're solid.
It’s arguably similar to the value proposition Apple brings to a lot of their customers. Time is money, and having things just work the way they’re supposed to seems to get rarer and rarer. Or maybe I’m just getting older, I dunno. I wish we had more firms that still valued quality and proper customer service in this world. Too much chinesium junk out there these days, in a race to the bottom that everyone loses.
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This is an ignorant take that needs to no longer be held.
Mechanical Engineer and product designer here. I've been using mcmaster daily for 20 years to do my job. It is definitely the standard by which all others are judged. I'll gladly pay 2, 3, 5, even 10x the price to get it from McMaster. The service, the CAD models, I have what I need the next day. As an example of the level of their service, you can send them a box of loose parts, no part numbers, no markings, and the…
Alas, for some reason they only cater to the US market and have no presence in the EU, for example. So while it is possible to order from them, it's rather inconvenient as you need to deal with customs/taxes. Digi-Key got this right: you can order DDP, which makes things quick & simple. Incidentally, I am amazed that they don't have a meaningful competitor in the EU. It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s…
The B2B vacuum of Europe.
So many voids to fill, for the ones daring to share product details and, gasp, prices, online.
Living in Germany I'm really disappointed there is nothing like Mcmaster here. Misumi is kind of close, but is online-only and doesn't work with private customers.