I used to order small quantities of aluminum from onlinemetals.com - it wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t outrageously expensive either.

I did a price check on a 1-foot by 2-foot sheet of perforated aluminum, 0.063” thick with 0.09375” holes and including shipping it’s around $80, which seems absurd.

A 10% discount code doesn’t reduce the pain either.

Have I been living under a rock, or has Bidenflation gotten even more insane than expected, or are there any alternative suppliers that I should be checking out?

Honestly, you just need to do a google search and start some quote requests.
There are several metal distributors central to CT and along the coast. I don't really do business North and East of Hartford, but there may be more.
Type-out what you want in Word or Notepad and it's an easy copy/paste into an email request. Even one easier is put all their emails into one RFQ and BCC them all.
Buying a larger pieceand cutting it yourself will usually be cheaper, if you need multiples.

This is a single piece for a "one-off" project.

Guess that either I'll have to bite the bullet and pay the going rate, or find an alternative way to handle the ventilation for the power supply chassis that I'm building.

Seems like the price is in the ballpark for a small piece. Check with McNichols, they probably supply onlinemetals with their inventory.

It was interesting to check out McNichols - there is only a small overlap between their perforated aluminum sheet offerings and those available from onlinemetals.com - so if indeed they do supply onlinemetals with perforated aluminum inventory, they are evidently not the only such supplier.


The quoted price for a 24" x 36" sheet was pretty close between the two vendors, with onlinemetals actually a few dollars less. I have not compared shipping prices, however.

I've bought small amounts of oddball metal on ebay.  
Prices aren't competitive with buying normal quantities, but if you only need a small amount and are unlikely to ever have a use for any leftovers from a larger quantity it can be cheaper.  

I'm probably going to end up buying a larger sheet in order to keep the per-sq-ft. price down, so I will have some left over for other future projects.

I may also look into purchasing some other metal stock, in order to see whether I may be able to combine shipping.