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Purchasing compression spring latches online

Hi everyone

I'm trying to get my hands on some compression spring latches, and have only been able to find them at McMaster.com, but they don't ship to Canada. 

The latches I'm looking for are for this instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Underwater-Housing-for-miniDV/step2/More-shopping/

Any ideas where I can find this? I've been scouring the net for a while and can't find anything. Checked out local hardware stores, home depot, lowes, etc, and no luck. Looked at ebay, and can only find some guys from hong kong selling these and they're not made out of stainless steel (which is necessary; this project is exposed to a lot of water).

Thx in advance.


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9
kelseymh says: Jan 10, 2012. 5:12 PM
Are you sure McMaster-Carr doesn't ship to Canada? I just tried building a phony order. Under "Ship To", the default is "USA", but you can also select OTHER, which then gives you "State/Province", "Postal Code", and "Country" fields to fill in.

I am fairly sure that when I was a post-doc at UBC, we ordered a lot of stuff from McMaster-Carr.
3
David Catriel (author) in reply to kelseymhJan 10, 2012. 5:14 PM
Yeah, positive. I built the order, submitted the payment, and got an email from them a few hours later saying they only ship to existing Canadian customers. There was no such notice on their site, which really sucked.
9
kelseymh in reply to David CatrielJan 10, 2012. 6:13 PM
How extremely annoying :-( And that "existing customers" comment probably explains why we got stuff from them at UBC.

I will say that I have had very good customer service from them over the phone. If you haven't found a Canadian source yet, you might try giving their Chicago office a call and talk to a human being. They might be able to futz the system for you.

Have you tried Grainger or MSC? I did a Google search and found a bunch from Nielsen on Amazon, which claim to be 304-SS.
3
David Catriel (author) in reply to kelseymhJan 10, 2012. 6:29 PM
Thx for the extra feedback. Kept on poking around, and seem to have found what I need at fastenal. They even have stores in my area, so I'm going to check them out tomorrow. Will let you so others might benefit as well.

As a side note, running a search on "McMaster equivalent in Canada" returns several hits from people that got stuck just like me. The site says nothing about order to Canada, they let you enter an order, and they contact you a while later to say they can't do anything for you. Pretty sucky way of doing business.
3
David Catriel (author) in reply to David CatrielJan 11, 2012. 6:52 AM
Well, Fastenal worked. They have a catalog of items similar to McMaster (although not as extensive), are located nearby, and had what I needed. Thx for looking into this kelseymh!
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