Sourcing
Materials and processes age slowly. Supply chains age weekly.
ForMatter's job is to be authoritative on the first and a signpost on the second. This page is the signpost — curated link clusters that point you at the live infrastructure questions you have to answer before you actually spec a part: who sells the raw stock, who runs the service bureau, what certification body governs the standard, where the regional fab directories live.
Links go stale. Each cluster carries a last-checked date so you know how old the editorial pass is. If you find a broken link, mail it to phil at renato dot design.
This page deliberately does not participate in search, filtering, or the project workspace. It's a sibling to /voices.html and /disclaimer.html — a flat reference, not a queryable surface.
Raw material suppliers
last checked 2026-04-28 · Where to actually buy small-quantity stock for prototyping, plus the larger industrial mills behind the supply chain.
- McMaster-Carr — The default for hobby and prototype stock — metals, plastics, fasteners, abrasives. US-only direct, but the catalog itself is the canonical materials reference.
- Online Metals — Cut-to-size aluminum, steel, brass, copper, titanium. Better unit pricing than McMaster for larger pieces.
- Sculpt Nouveau — Specialty patinas, dyes, finishing chemicals for sculpture-grade work.
- Boulter Plywood — Marine and aircraft plywood, premium veneers — the canonical premium plywood source.
- Curbell Plastics — Sheet and rod plastic stock — PMMA, PC, PP, PEEK, UHMW, etc.
- Rio Grande — Jewelry-grade metal, casting investment, gemstones, hand tools.
- Rotometals — Pewter, bismuth, tin, lead, low-melt alloys for casting.
- TAP Plastics — Acrylic, fiberglass, casting resins — strong for west-coast US designers.
- Hobart Welders supplier directory — Find a local welding-supply distributor for filler rod, gas, consumables.
Process service bureaus
last checked 2026-04-28 · Outsource a one-off or low-volume run when you don't own the tool yourself.
- Protolabs — Injection molding, CNC, sheet metal, 3D printing — the canonical price-anchor for low-volume production.
- Xometry — Manufacturing-on-demand marketplace; instant quoting across CNC, 3D printing, sheet metal, casting.
- Shapeways — 3D-printing service bureau — strong for designer-quantity SLS, MJF, metal.
- Fictiv — CNC and injection-molding partner network; engineering-managed quality.
- Sculpteo — European 3D-printing service; useful EU-side counterpart to Shapeways.
- PCBWay — PCB fabrication + assembly; also CNC and 3D printing.
- Ponoko — Laser cutting + 3D printing; useful for designer-quantity sheet work.
Certification bodies and standards
last checked 2026-04-28 · When you need to cite a standard verbatim, this is where to look it up.
Safety, compliance, and regulatory
last checked 2026-04-29 · When the part touches food, skin, a child, or a worker, the regulatory question comes before the design question. These are the canonical entry points — not the law itself, but the body that publishes it.
- FDA Food Contact Substances database — US: every polymer, additive, and coating that may legally touch food. Search by substance or by Food Contact Notification number; the answer is binary (cleared or not) but the use-conditions matter — read the linked notification.
- EU REACH / ECHA portal — EU: registration, evaluation, authorisation, and restriction of chemicals. SVHC (Substances of Very High Concern) candidate list updates twice a year; check before specifying a colorant, plasticizer, or flame retardant in any EU-bound product.
- EU RoHS Directive 2011/65/EU — EU: lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, PBB, PBDE, phthalates banned in electrical and electronic equipment. Drives the lead-free solder, lead-free brass, and chrome-VI-free chrome plating norms across consumer electronics.
- OSHA worker safety standards — US: workplace exposure limits (PELs), respiratory protection, machine guarding. Wood-dust, formaldehyde, hexavalent chromium, lead, and isocyanate (PU resins) all carry specific standards. The studio is a workplace too.
- CPSC consumer product safety database — US: lead in children's products (<100 ppm under CPSIA), small parts and choking hazards, sleep-environment regulations, art-materials labeling (LHAMA / ASTM D-4236).
- ISO 10993 — Biocompatibility evaluation — Skin-contact, mucosal-contact, and implant medical-device biocompatibility. The standard family any wearable, jewelry-with-skin-contact, or medical-grade product gets evaluated against.
- California Proposition 65 list — CA: chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive harm. Triggers the canonical 'WARNING' label on consumer products sold in California — read before choosing a colorant, brass alloy (lead), or solder formulation.
Materials property databases
last checked 2026-05-11 · Where to fact-check a property number — modulus, density, melting point, dielectric constant, hardness, lifecycle indicators. Free where noted; institutional / paywalled where the abstract layer alone is still useful as a starting point.
- MakeItFrom — Free property data for thousands of metals, plastics, ceramics, and composites — the main fact-check resource for ForMatter's property tables. Comparable-pair pages (e.g. 6061 vs 7075) are the strongest single-page format on the open web.
- MatWeb — Searchable property datasheets across alloys, plastics, ceramics, composites, fluids, and fibers. Free search; full datasheet view requires a free account. The largest free property database on the open web.
- AZoM (A-Z of Materials) — Free editorial materials encyclopedia plus aggregated supplier datasheets. Articles are reasonably citable for context; cross-check property numbers against MakeItFrom or MatWeb.
- Granta CES EduPack (educational) — Industry-canonical materials-and-processes database; widely used in design schools. Subscription, but the EduPack tier is the reference design schools build their materials curriculum around.
- NIST Chemistry WebBook — Free thermophysical and chemical property data for pure substances — heats of formation, vapor pressures, IR / mass spectra. The canonical reference for any chemistry-adjacent property claim.
- The Materials Project — Free DFT-computed properties for inorganic crystals — band gap, formation energy, elastic constants, phonon dispersion. Run from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; free with account. Cite as computed, not measured.
- NIMS MatNavi — Japan's National Institute for Materials Science — free polymer, metal, ceramic, and superconducting-materials databases. The polymer database is particularly strong; English UI throughout.
- CAMPUS Plastics — Free plastics datasheet portal maintained by the resin producers themselves (BASF, Covestro, DSM, etc.). Property numbers are tested to consistent ISO methods, so they're directly comparable across vendors.
- UL Prospector — Plastics, coatings, adhesives, lubricants, personal-care ingredients. Free with industry account. Strongest tool for finding a specific commercial grade by property requirement.
- The Wood Database (Eric Meier) — Free identification and working-properties reference for hundreds of wood species — Janka hardness, modulus, workability, allergens, sustainability status. The default for any wood-species lookup on the open web.
- Mindat — Free mineralogy and geology database covering thousands of mineral species — crystallography, optical properties, type localities, museum specimens. The reference behind any stone or gemstone entry.
Lifecycle inventories
last checked 2026-05-11 · Cradle-to-gate inventory data for sustainability work — embodied carbon, energy, water, and the EPD record behind a specific product.
- Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) — Hammond & Jones — Free PDF; embodied-carbon data for construction materials. The default cradle-to-gate reference for architecture-school sustainability assignments.
- ecoinvent — The largest commercial life-cycle inventory database. Subscription required, but the abstracts are public.
- ÖKOBAUDAT — Free German federal LCA database for construction products — the reference behind EU EPD declarations and DGNB / BNB sustainability certifications.
- EPDs International — Environmental Product Declarations searchable by product category.
Environmental impact calculators
last checked 2026-04-28 · Run quick impact estimates for a specific material or process choice.
Regional fab directories
last checked 2026-04-28 · Where to find a maker space, hackerspace, fab lab, or sympathetic shop near you.
Peer publications and editorial lineage
last checked 2026-05-11 · Editorial publications that center materials the way ForMatter does — kin, not sources. A ForMatter entry is a database row with a voice block; these publications run the long-form essay the voice block points back to. Read them; cite them in your own work; do not lift their text into a database entry. Where a publication has a deep dive on a material ForMatter also covers, the right move is a 'further reading' link out, not a paraphrase.
- Material Intelligence (Chipstone Foundation) — An online magazine published by the Chipstone Foundation; each issue gathers essays from many disciplines around a single everyday material, with art-historical and anthropological framing alongside the technical. The single-material-as-anthology format is the closest peer to ForMatter's per-entry voice-block stack on the open web. Where ForMatter and MI cover the same material, link out and read the issue — never reproduce or paraphrase the articles into a database entry.
- Cabinet Magazine — Long-running culture magazine that periodically devotes whole issues to a single material or material condition — Property (issue 10), Mountains (27), Shame (31), Dust (35), among many others. Back issues sold out; the full archive reads free online. The editorial register — material as a hinge between disciplines — is part of ForMatter's lineage.
- Edible Geography (Nicola Twilley) — Long-form essays on the material infrastructure of food — refrigeration, salt, ice, packaging, supply chain. The reference style for writing about a material as a system rather than a thing.
- 99% Invisible — Roman Mars's design podcast and archive. The episodes that center a material or a manufacturing process are the audio analogue of a ForMatter voice block — short, citationally honest, narratively shaped around a single object or substance.
- Disegno Journal — Biannual design journal with strong materials and process reporting — closer to a critic's register than a database, useful for the cultural reading underneath a CMF specification.