My day job is building one-off prototypes as a mechanical engineer in a research lab, so I end up sourcing a lot of random stuff like this in small quantities.

My day job is building one-off prototypes as a mechanical engineer in a research lab, so I end up sourcing a lot of random stuff like this in small quantities. As others have mentioned, my first stop is the usual suspects, mostly McMaster and Misumi. If not I might check with a few local industrial distributors, including some independent ones but also local branches of Motion Canada, Wajax, GBS and whatnot. If that fails, I usually resort to contacting the manufacturer directly, either phone or email, and asking if they either do B2B direct sales or if they have a distributor for my region they can put me in touch with. Industrial sales is still very much old-school b2b, around here at least (Canada). For many of my local suppliers, the only way to get an idea of prices is to call or email a RFQ and wait a day or two to get a quote back. One lists their prices in their paper catalog only, which at least saves me the RFQ quote. Many distributors are B2B only but some, especially in my small-ish town, will do B2C too.