Like the title says, does anyone know where to buy individual tools in bulk? Like if I want a whole bin of 10mm sockets, or several dozen 13mm ratcheting wrenches, where would I go looking for that? I can really only find complete sets, but if I want the components to assemble several dozen individual sets with specific sizes where do I go? Would the most cost effective way to do this be to buy a lot of cheap kits and break them down into their individual components?
You can buy individuals at Home Depot and Lowes but I'm not sure if that's cost effective.
In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :
Right, but that's so wildly expensive it would be more cost effective to buy a 30pc set if I want say... 5 of the tools inside it, and throw out the rest. I'd rather not do that, and I have to imagine that the manufacturers are getting whole boxes of these things somewhere.
When I looked into this before, wanting to sell multipacks of 10mm, I found it cheaper (per socket) to buy full sets if i wanted less than 1,000 at a time.
Edit: I made a thread about it but can't find it. I thought it was called "who should I call" but that's not bringing back results. Probably 2 or 3 years old now.
You can get in touch with a Snap-On industrial rep and buy Williams branded sockets for a few bucks a piece, as many as you want.
You can get Snappy too but it costs a bit more.
Might be a job for Alibaba.
Sample: 10mm sockets for 45 cents with 100 minimum
PS: I have not bought anything from Alibaba and you need to be pretty good at reading Chinglish.
Estate sales/garage sales would be my go to for this, if I didn't need it immediately.
Grainger.com has 10mm sockets for $2.64 each. find your local grainger rep and see if he will give you bulk pricing. might also try Mcmaster, fastenall, etc.
There is at least one pawn shop in town that has bins of used tools, mildly separated. If they didn't need to be matching, new tools, that might work.
What's the usage? We sometimes need to supply tools with products at work, we've done it three ways:
-Buy from McMaster/Fastenal/Grainger, however for sockets and wrenches this is pricey. We do this for security torx bits, which are cheap to begin with and we do relatively low volume.
-Buy from eBay/china, whatever buyout lot happens to be cheapest, and if no satisfactory quality pieces are available, suck it up and pay more elsewhere that month. We do this with stubby screwdrivers at the moment because it's $4+ from the above sources and well under $2 from eBay when they pop up.
-Get in contact with the manufacturer and order direct. Only works for 500+ pcs obviously.
If you are trying to piece together, like, rally car service sets, I have...buckets...of low quality sockets and standard wrenches I am never going to use, that you could pick through.
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