Subject: McMaster Catalog & Purchasing Metals

From: [email-masked] (Jim Driscoll)
Date: 26 Jan 1995 18:59:31 GMT

For those of you searching for a McMaster-Carr catalog, it might be of
interest that I recently received the new edition of their catalog
(number 101).  So now might be a good time to try to scrounge the old
edition (sorry, mine is already spoken for).

The catalog is about 9" x 6" x 3" thick, fire engine yellow with green
lettering, and with McMaster printed vertically down the spine in large
letters.

The word from this newsgroup seems to be that it is difficult to
obtain a catalog without being an actual business of some size, but
that with a catalog in hand it is easy to place an order.  One
participant remarked that it is nearly as complete and almost as fast
as the Acme catalog that Wile E. Coyote uses, and I agree.  The
consensus also seems to be that that the prices are a bit high, but
here I must disagree.

Mcmaster-Carr has a broad range of supplies for industrial
maintenance, and they have several competitors in that range.
W. W. Grainger has a much more complete supply of electric motors and
hydraulic equipment and correspondingly more agressive pricing.  MSC
and its companions have a very complete selection of machinery and
tooling along with lower pricing.  So if there is a more specific
competitor, you probably want to go with them.

An example of something I find to be a good deal from McMaster is
their selction of sanitary tube fittings.  The manufacturer of these
fittings that McMaster buys from is L. C. Thompsen.  The Thompsen list
price for a 1.5" end cap is $4.40.  If you are skilled at purchasing,
you can get 15% off that list (for net 3.74), and if you are both
skilled and reselling you can get 25% off (for net 3.30)).  The
McMaster price for 4-up is 3.52, and I get it the next day.  Since I
don't resell, its a better deal for me to buy from McMaster rather
than the manufacturer.

On the other hand a stainless weld scale removal chemical that I use
is much cheaper from the manufacturer than from McMaster, probably
because it is such a specialized and low volume product.

But I think the real reason that McMaster has a reputation with this
group of being expensive is that their price for metal stock is high.
To understand why this is so, and what to do about it as a consumer of
metal, you need to understand a little about the distribution of
metals.

The start of the food chain is the mill.  The mill produces metals in
certain standard (i.e. "Mill") forms such as plate, sheet, coil,
angle, bar, rod, and hexagon.  They sell to moderate to large
industrial consumers.  The only time I dealt with a mill was when I
was trying to get a good price on 3/16 sheet CDA122, a non
electrolytic copper with good welding characteristics typically used
for plumbing and for roofs, but not very common in 3/16 sheet.  If I
was willing to buy an ingots worth (about 5,000#, I recall) they were
willing to deal with me.  You would place an order, and when it was
processed your cost would be the market price of copper that day
(e.g. as printed in the Wall Street Journal) plus a $0.60/# processing
fee plus transportation costs.  If you want to protect yourself
against sudden rises in the commodity cost, then you will need to buy
a future.  In the end I bought a metric ton through Gugenheim, who in
this case acted as a broker for a mill in Chile.  The price was right,
but the lead time was 4-5 months.

Mills also sell to service centers, which can be thought of as their
value-added distributors, although some mills act as service centers
themselves.  A service center will stock mill forms, but will also
process them as well into forms suitable for end users.  For example,
it will take coil and turn it into sheet in certain standard sizes,
slit coil, and shear plate for bar.  If you want you can get them to
"cut-to-length" a non-standard length from coil to reduce your waste
or fabrication cost.  I deal primarily with service centers, in
particular a small, local, stainless service center.  They are small
enough that I can show up with a trailer and they will load my order.
In this way a can save on the delivery cost.

Except for the cut-to-length I just mentioned, a service center deals
in standard lengths.  So if you need some 4" rod, you will have to buy
20' of it from them, which may not be what you had in mind.  In this
case you will have to deal with brokers and others higher up in the
food chain that are willing to stock a lot of material and cut off 12"
>from  that 20' long piece of 4" rod and figure out who to sell the
remainder to.  They will charge a premium for this service.

There are dealers out there with odd niches.  For example, I needed
some stainless square tube.  My service center doesn't stock tube or
pipe, wich is a somewhat orthogonal distribution channel beginning
with a tube mill.  I only needed a little, so it didn't make sense to
pay the tranportation charges from the big distributors that did stock
it.  I bought it from a broker who would only sell me a standard
length (so he didn't have so stock and sell the left overs) but was
willing to cut it into UPS-able pieces and ship it.  Presumably
this guy makes his money by consolidating small orders to a
distributor/mill in addition to his premium price.

So the moral of the story with this as well as all industrial
purchasing is to stay as low as possible on the food chain; it is
inefficient and expensive to do otherwise.  In some cases McMaster
will be appropriate, in others it won't.

 Jim Driscoll
 Driscoll Brewing