Searching for bits - how to do it better ?

I have many frustrations in life but one that comes up again and again is the time it takes to find just the right part on the web to help make the perfect repair.

Todays 'waste of time' involves the search for some double coil spring washers for the lamp unit on my Meteor drill grinder.

When I enter this term into google I get tons of irrelevant rubbish. I thought the way to be more specific was to put the key words in inverted commas. When I do this I still get tons of irrelevant rubbish including 'single coil' washers which I'm not interested in.

So my question is: how should I refine my searches so that I can see only sellers / products that I require ?

(Specifically I'm looking for a double coil spring washer with a bore of around 3mm. These don't look to be too popular (hence the mess on my grinder, probably) but I feel someone, somewhere, must have what I need.)

Gerry

Search for "Imperial Double Coil Spring Washers Thackery" on Ebay.

Martin C

These are the smallest I could find after a 5 min search:-

ebay 9/64" Thackery Washer

Not listed directly on BA Bolts Ltd website (that I could find) for some reason though.

All I did to help refine the search, was to add M3 to the start of your "search term", but still had to sift through quite a bit of dross.

Edit:- found the listing , but still does not include 9/64"

BA Bolts Limited

Edited By Nick Hughes on 16/04/2023 14:54:36

You could try searching for 6BA ones
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324951181485

I often search in Google, when I'm not sure of the exact description, but search on "Images" rather than "All"
Obviously this then shows a series of photos, from which it's often possible to extract other useful search terms.
e.g. a search for "Double Spring Washers", shows several photos including the word "Thackery", so you can then add that to the search box to narrow the field a bit; similarly you might even find the BS or DIN number.

Bill

Hi, what you need to search for is double coil rectangular section spring washer Double coil spring

Regards Nick.

On eBay I only got 11 results, including this one. They were all double coil spring washers.

Did you put the search terms within quotes?

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/04/2023 15:07:50

By default search engines look wide and broad but the syntax can be tightened. Or, the user can fill in an advanced search form, this one is google's.

Dave

I have original imperial unused blackened Thackerys of 3/16" bore in my stock if they would help?.

Best I can do is 5/16 they are left overs from fitting 40 DCOE’s

I tried googling "types of spring washer" and found this site with a good selection:

**LINK**

I'm sure people have mentioned a way of providing Google with a picture and telling it to find similar pictures....??

Gerry

Once upon a time [long, long, ago] you could force Google search to include a specific term, by including the + symbol

… and force it to exclude a specific term, by including the - symbol

All quite logical

But then they invented Google plus [whatever that is] and decided to kill the + functionality “to avoid confusion”

The use of quotation marks works [after a fashion] but is not as powerful as + was

Thankfully - does still seem to work, so you should be able to exclude the word single from your search results.

Hope that makes sense … give it a try !

MichaelG.

There's several different methods.
If you open a conventional Google search box, there's a camera icon at the right hand end.
https://www.google.co.uk/ 
Click on that, and you can either paste an image's URL into the search box, drag an image into it or upload a file.
You can therefor photograph something yourself and upload the picture for a similar image search.

Depending on your browser, you might be able to install Tin Eye, which is a reverse image search tool; right click on an image and select Tin Eye from the drop down menu.
It can also be used in a similar fashion to Google from its own web page.
https://tineye.com/

One website I use regularly is SmallSEOTools, which again works along similar lines.
https://smallseotools.com/reverse-image-search/
This one however simultaneously searches Yandex, Bing, and Google Images, though the latter seems a little more limited than Google Eye.

Bill

Edited By peak4 on 16/04/2023 22:22:48

I needed some such washers a few years back and found it very difficult to get them locally, or even not so locally.

They seem to be not so much used now, but I always found them to be very useful for similar jobs to the one mentioned. No point in trying your local D I Y shop, I think !

Update for Gerry …

I have just tried a Google search for:

spring washer, double coil

[exactly as that ^^^, with no quotes or other tricks]

Loads of results, many with pictures

MichaelG.

Type- 6ba ( 1/8” ) Double Coil steel spring washers x 10 in to eBay and a listing for what you require should appear