Great point and agree it could be a great stand alone thread topic as everyone has a different viewpoint on their mental math on where they spend money.
Earlier on in my professional tenure post college, I was often too prone to try and find locally available solutions or order a product available from multiple sources from a more local vendor/local branch location at the sacrifice of speed(and likely cost but speed was more important). When I saw the $ value of bills paid for general day to day supplies and local services(local was within 20 miles radius) to keep a 350 to 400 person plant operating over the prior 12 months it was a large enough number that changed the perspective. Time and our engineering team resources were our bigger constraints, so if there was a viable local solution that didn't sacrifice the solution/implementation timing we'd go with it. If that local solution was going to significantly impact implementation or resources we would normally move to that non-local source. If it was ordered on McMaster by about 1pm and in stock in Chicago, it was on our dock generally by lunch the next day...if it came from the Jersey warehouse it showed up around 4:30. Solve it and move on. This is specifically to expensed build items/minor changes/repairs etc, if it was a capitalized purchase the rules change.
Personally I'm too fast to buy various pieces/parts "cause it's a great deal" and try and put something together cause I'm not valuing my time high enough and the resulting project takes far too long and could've bought the complete product and been using it for months now...case in point the dust collection project. Fasteners basically all come from McMaster or local hardware store as Fastenal now acts like a private club and without a business account you don't get in, but the solenoid valves for my blast gates were 7x more at McMaster....better product but for my application the cheaper version was closer to what I needed. I bought a garage door opener today on Prime Day as the local distributor wouldn't sell the opener alone to me and their installed price was 2.5x my cost of the opener...but will likely pay one of their guys to install it. I would've preferred to pay the local people vs Amazon, but the premium was too much to justify in my head. I'm trying to be more intentional with who the money is going to and try to lead with local first when viable, just doesn't always work out. I think this mindset is fairly pervasive across GJ, but we all have our own "weighting" of what's most important which makes it interesting
But that's enough side tracking of your thread...back to more cool custom fabrication stuff or where ever else you're willing to take us!
. Just logged back on in the last few days and caught up with all of the changes in your life and your shop. You are climbing the learning curve quickly, clearly due to a lot of hard work and persistence!
