Best Place to Buy Material in Sheets? (Steel, Aluminum, Acrylic, etc)

Where do you get your raw materials for projects such as CNC, waterjet, or laser cutting? I’d like to start off with some acrylic to practice with - are there places with a wide range of stock thicknesses? I’m looking for 3/16" as well as some thinner sizes to see if I can convert designs into stacking cases.

This really depends on where you are in the world, but a good place to start would probably simply by typing ‘sheet metal supplier’ into Google and see if any local business shows up. You might also be able to find regional suppliers but beware larger companies might not entertain small orders from individual customers, preferring B2B style orders with large quantities.

I found a couple in the UK by Googling, such as this one: https://www.metals4u.co.uk/

Another venue is to go find a local makerspace or hackspace and ask around. I’d imagine the process for finding acrylic or polycarbonate suppliers would be similar.

I’ll do some more research online, I saw some other makers posting about their materials, so I’ll see if I can find those old posts online to see where they order from.