Where to buy springs, copper spacers, metal plates etc?

Been dabbling a little into electronics and customisation but usually use parts from one flashlight to transfer to another or something to that effect.

Often I will find myself lacking some parts and have to use unsuitable substitutes.

Is there any place online that I can buy various sizes of springs for flashlights? How about copper spacers?

I'm also wondering what is a good way to create 'contact plates' for batteries as I am trying to fashion some type of battery holder and would need to have a spring on the negative end, a contact plate on the positive end which is also linked by some metal/wire to wherever it needs to go.

Do all this have to be factory made or custom made with a CNC lathe or something? Or is there any place that sells small little parts like these?

Thanks for any help!

One way to get them is to strip them out of battery holders like you find at the electronics places like newark, digikey, etc.

SS springs can be found at mcmastercarr.com.

Some copper springs can be found at smallpartsinc.com.

Copper springs are surprisingly hard to find off the shelf. If you find another source, let me know.

Thanks Harry,

I'm over in Singapore so no local US stores need apply... haha
If I find anything in this side of the world, I'll let you know.

Guess short of factory or self customisation, its hard to get all the necessary parts to build stuff up from scratch. I'll keep looking.