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Comment by eimrine | Hacker News Reader

I have a dream of producing custom recumbents. I don't know where to get thin-walled pipes, but a start capital is roughly as you have described.

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McMaster-Carr supplies thin-wall chromoly tube [0] suitable for fabricating bicycle frames.

[0] tube is measured by the outer diameter; pipe is measured by the inner diameter

bicycle tube for making bikes out of chromoly can be bought from many makers. The good stuff doesn't have uniform wall thickness but has thinner sides and thicker top/bottom for lower weight/stiffness. It should also have butted ends, meaning that it has thicker walls at the ends.

McMaster-Carr won’t sell to small companies, my friends and I have tried several times, only to have orders cancelled for the above-mentioned reason. It’s a shame because their website has a wealth of information (CAD drawings, measurements, etc.), one of the best I’ve seen.

The website and all the part details are amazing. I've made many purchases from McMaster for personal / hobby use so I'm surprised to hear about difficulties purchasing from them.

We are in Ontario, Canada, if it matters. I know Quinn from blondiehacks orders from them without difficulty, so I’m not sure what it is about us that they don’t like. They tend to be very curt/nearing unfriendly in their responses.

There may be difficulties shipping cross-border (customs is hell) - so maybe you "need" to find an address just over the border in the US to ship to instead?

I do have a US PO Box, so I will try this next time. Thanks for the suggestion.

Those also don't usually allow "package" delivery (think UPS) but maybe something can be worked out. Some small post offices will accept a UPS delivery to "unit PO BOX number" but I don't think they're supposed to.

Some USPS locations do offer a Street Addressing option that allows for receiving parcels to a PO Box:

https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing/competitivepoboxes

Quinn is in LA. They just don't like bothering with international shipping.

Ah, my mistake, thanks for letting me know.

What exactly have you tried to order? I've been ordering from McMaster both to a fairly small business and my personal home address with absolutely no issues for over 8 years.

Are you in the US? If you're trying to buy those tubes, are you trying to order very long lengths? UPS apparently has a limit of 108" total length, and a sum of 165" for length + "girth".

As for McMaster overall - I agree with some other sentiments here that they're great, though I do admit the "McMaster tax" (paying 10~200% what you could find the identical part somewhere else for) can be annoying at times, but is worth it when you want a reliable supplier with almost universally good quality products.

edit: Based on your reply to a sibling comment, I looked around, and found this thread that seems to reinforce your experience that McMaster shipping to Canada is...unreliable: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/mcmaster-carr-supplying-to-int...

I would try the recommendation there of ensuring you have a business name on the order, or, contact their support - I've had to contact them a couple times and they were generally quite helpful.

Good luck.

Did they explicitly tell you that's why the order was cancelled? I've placed many personal orders with them and never had issues.

Their reply, verbatim:

Hi xxxx,

We only ship to large businesses and schools in Canada. We can't accept your order. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. You might want to try Fastenal or Motion Canada.

Lauren

FWIW, one of the benefits of Fastenal is being able to walk in and browse the shelves (just ask them when they're not busy. Never had a problem)

idk. they made me get a commercial account. and their stock for my local shop leans heavily towards grade-8 construction fasteners and not the smaller machine screws that I generally use.

I can pretty much guarantee that this is due to customs/import charges. Consumers will cancel orders over a surprise bill from that, a big business won't care at all or will have their own broker.

I could be confusing them with DigiKey, but I think McMaster handle customs themselves, no customer action needed.

If that's a problem to them, I'm guessing they don't have a fully automated solution to that like e.g. DigiKey does.

Were you ordering as an individual? They definitely ship to small businesses on both sides of the border, but might be leery of an individual handling the customs stuff properly. Maybe solve that with a UPS account?

I have successfully ordered and received parts from McMaster-Carr as an individual.

I'm not sure if this is a super variable experience or if it has changed over time (I first ordered from them in 2020).

I just ordered 40 SS J Bolts from them for my home project after spending a couple of weeks fruitlessly trying to get them from a local company. I placed an order on the website and they showed up in 2 days.

Aircraft spruce sells tubing in a variety of lengths, and ship to Canada. They're a good source for tubes that don't fit normal framebuilding supply inventories. They ship to Canada directly:

https://www.aircraftspruce.ca/

I've built a bike frame with their 4130 tubes.

I am a business of one and I've bought from McMaster-Carr often. A long time ago (like 25 years ago) it was harder to buy from them as a tiny company, but these days they take credit cards on an online shopping list like everyone else.

Since you're in Canada too, my experience might be relevant. My first McMaster order last year was cancelled with the following response:

"Due to the cost and complexity of shipping our products to Canada, we are only able to accept orders from businesses and schools. We’ve canceled your order. If this material is not for personal use, please resubmit your order online using the business or school name."

After that, I added my company's legal name to both shipping and billing address, put "Please note: this order is for business" in order comments the first couple times, and had no problems since.

I wish we had something similar in Canada that has a good selection and isn't a pain to deal with, but as it stands, McMaster is too good to give up on.

ETA: Having read your other comment, it appears they might have restricted their policy since then, but grandfathered existing clients. That would be really sad for Canadians.

Local metals dealer?

But at this point carbon fiber is pretty easy to manufacture. For a bike frame the hard part would be design optimization and stress calculations. It might even be easier once you have the molds. I'm not really sure I understand why some upstart carbon bike company hasn't cleaned up given how inexpensively some of the no-name carbon parts from china are (and how they appear to be at least as good if not better than some of the name brand stuff in some cases).

I see some high end custom jobs where they swapped some of the carbon fiber with some kind of coating on some kind of styrofoam. Its much more bulky to get usable strength but its not that heavy and it makes no noise.

Are you going to make the old-timey recombants with the steering below the seat, unlike the modern ones with the huge handlebars? I miss those. Like this one:

https://www.cyclingabout.com/heaviest-touring-bike-ever-behe...

(I met this guy in Cambridge Mass in the 80's).

Funny how most of that gear could just be an iPhone now!

I remember this from the 80’s too, I was 8 when I met him and it was the coolest thing ever.

It's insane, right? GPS antenna tech evolved crazy fast after high-res GPS was made available to the public in the mid-90's. Not to mention all the 3G/LTS/4G/5G investment.

Things could still be made smaller if there were more antennae nearby: hence lower transmit power. But I think the smartphone format is pretty dang near perfect.

> Are you going to make the old-timey recombants with the steering below the seat, unlike the modern ones with the huge handlebars?

I think that steer is something easily replaceable. I want to do lowriders - when the lowest point of butt is lower than a line between two axles. This is an incredible fast form-factor for totally good roads. Thanks HN for a discussion.

https://framebuildersupply.com/

https://www.torchandfile.com/

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