McMaster-Carr
Assembly Line
The Smartest Website You Haven't Heard of
Finally, one of the most brilliant parts of McMaster’s product is that for nearly every part, they have a CAD file that you can instantly download into your 3D models. Mechanical engineers mock up designs in CAD programs before actually building them, and having access to pre-modeled parts saves time. (Imagine having to manually model all your nuts and bolts.) McMaster even has extensions for popular CAD programs which allow you to import part files directly, instead of using their website. This makes engineer’s lives 10x easier (not to mention making them more likely to purchase from McMaster-Carr). The closest analogy to this is AR try-on, but that’s not even very accurate. The point of AR try-on is to determine whether you like the item you’re about to buy, whereas the point of McMaster’s CAD downloads is to speed up an engineer’s workflow. In most cases, they already know which part they need, it’s just a matter of completing the CAD model before they can start building the real thing.