Suggestion for parts supplier?

[peace brainerd]

I"m diy'ing something has finally got me hacking into cheap off the shelf stuff because I cannot find parts. I'm looking for temperature and pressure passive monitoring of a water cooling circuit. The temperature displays with thermistor/senders I located at one of the PC overclocking/watercooling vendors. But they are less than Ideal. LCD instead of led (poor "off axis" visibility). But they are extremely cheap at six bucks each.

The pressure sensor is for now going to be a disassembled digital tire pressure gauge since that gives me the peizo transducer with led readout already packaged for the 0 to 60psi that I'm aiming for. But again, it's less than ideal being an LCD rather than LED. LED versions of gauges w/senders tend to be made for race cars and boats and are horribly expensive.

I want to go all digital since its range and calibration is practially universal. In order to do exactly what I need for this project with analog gauges I'd need special orders.

Recently, with another project, I ended up getting a $9.99 wireless doorbell at Menards for parts because I couldn't come anywhere near the price in parts alone for a remote pair of xmit and rcv switching devices. I don't want to start an argument about cheap foreign labor, but why aren't more of these parts available at better prices for the tinkering classes?

Why isn't there a vendor for a lot of this cool stuff? Or I should say, Is there a vendor for this stuff? Most of it is "hit or miss" at the surplus sales sites. When I do find better selections, here in the US anyway, it's often aerospace grade and aerospace prices.

[peace brainerd]

Does anyone have a list similar online vendors?

http://www.candhsales.biz/cgi-bin/sh...t_shopping.htm

I only discovered it after a couple of days of searching, so there must be a few more?

(and if you've never visited the site above, it's great fun. Click on the link to "browse all items" and you enter fifteen minute stroll through a disneyland of surplus. I went through all the pages and discovered quite a few things that I recall people here searching for)