I’ve been a McMaster-Carr fan for as long as I can remember. My dad would always have one of their huge catalog books both at his office and at home in his garage. Any time he needed a part, he would flip through the catalog and find what he was looking for.<p>As a young kid I remember spending hours flipping through the catalog when visiting my dad at work, marveling at the then hand-drawn illustrations of each product, wondering how a place could somehow sell what seemed like everything.<p>Even today, I use their site in a similar way. If I need to build something, fix something, or figure out what kind of parts for a project even exist, their site is usually my first stop, sometimes followed up with a text to my dad to ask him how he might solve it—which sometimes prompts him to walk out to his garage, pick up his now-dusty old copy of the printed McMaster book, and flip through it to find the right part.