[TheForge] Parts search, 1818 parts on Goog?

Wed May 15 01:40:46 EDT 2013

Bruce and Mike;
Same time, same station. ..Same old tunes.
I was gonna cut one down to fit,
but i think i found one of the same dimensions online at Repco.
But... no price/sign up and register and submit an inquiry on provided form 36-B.
I want more out of the insufferable/ubiquitous cloud, Damnit!

On May 14, 2013, at 9:46 PM, Mike Spencer wrote:

PF wrote:

> Why can't i enter a part name, manufacturer, model number, etc...and
> get the usual 10 pages of links?

I've had surprisingly good luck finding details about old stuff. [1]
Well, maybe  50%?  That's pretty good, I think.

But mailing lists, newsgroups and (I suppose) "social media" such as
Yahoo Groups devoted to a specific subject can turn up that guy who
knows where there's a garage-full of the thing you're looking for.

Part of the problem lies with the IT managers at corporate entities.
If Joe Blow, J. Random Tech-demi-god, or your friendly neighborhood
blacksmith creates a web site, they just write HTML files, take photos
and link it all together. Google spiders it and you an find it.

But a big corp has a team of web designers, a pointy-haired web
manager, a separate manager for IT resources, executive policy,
demands from marketing and a lot of coders and engineers.  What shakes
out of all that (see "policy" and "pointy-haired") is 'A new web
experience" for the user: flash, database backends, interactive
javascript, inline code and more.  It's all designed to suck the
individual user into the "experience" (the new buzzword).  Even when
the data *is there*, you have to wade through dancing hamsters,
animated doo-doo, slick-brochure-type bumpf and more to find it.

> Yaaaa...OK, there's no money in dealing with fools like me, but...

Some 7 years ago, my Black & Decker angle grinder that I bought about
1978 wore out a bearing. Called B&D.  They had the grinder in their
database.  The Guy said, "Wow, that's an *old* one".  Huh. 30 years
and it's old?   I had to go to a general-purpose bearing & seal
shop to get the bearing itself. B&D didn't have it.

About 1978, my 1925-era [2] B&D angle grinder broke a brush holder.
So I went in to Halifax in person to the (now vanished) B&D repair
depot and asked for the part.  The guy went to a long shelf, running
his finger along the ring binders of micro-fiche, then along the fat,
plastic-bound parts books, along the soiled, thin, paper-covered parts
books....

Finally, at the very end of the shelf, he pulled out this grimy,
grease-stained, tattered thing of about a dozen pages, flipped through
it, found my grinder, found my part.  He had 3 on the shelf so I
bought 2.  Not like that any more, is it?

> Any suggestions as to a technically/industrially oriented search
> service?

Try a jewelry list, group, blog, whatever?  Or make a brush from a
larger one.  I had the generator fail on my Land Rover when I was in
Sydney, ca. 400 miles from home and getting dark. I stumbled over a
garage that would rent bay space for not very much. So I walked over
to Canadian Tire, bought two or three brushes for [??] and
hacksawed & filed one of them to fit the gen. I was still working
years later when we sold the Rover.

Every time you fix an unfixable old thing, it's a pointy stick in the
eye of marketing droids. Also undermounds the economy [3], of course. :-)

- Mike

[1] My Atlas Copco compressor is an exception. Absolutely nothing on
   Google about it.  I finally found a guy whose buddy worked at
   Atlas Copco, who had full data base access. He eventually reported
   back that there is no record anywhere in their files of their ever
   having made that model.

[2] I have a tool catalog from 1925 that has my B&D 1/2" drill in it.
   It's the same ponderous, cast-aluminum style as the grinder so I'm
   guessing the grinder is the same vintage.  Both tools work fine.

[3] Like Puce Stamps.

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/WALT-KELLY-POGO-PUCE-STAMPS-BLOCK-GUARANTEED-WORTHLESS-BIG-ZERO-1962-ULTRA-RARE-/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjc1/$(KGrHqJ,!ooFBsb45j+SBQpm+RnnCg~~60_35.JPG
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