Good stuff

There are still a few places that sell quality fittings. For a hose nozzle try Lee Valley

Sears still sells some fairly good quality stuff. "Building Supply" stores generally stock good grades of plumbing.

Lowes and Home Depot are hit-n-miss with both personel and products. Never buy the cheapest grade offered....

My Ace Hardware has a small cabinet full of brushes in the tool department with about 100 different styles. I have had pretty good luck matching them up. BTW you may have to ask around, 2 employees said they didn't have any brushes before a guy said yes they did.

Ace and Sears have lifetime warrantys, at least you can exchange items. Craftsman hand tools are good.

It's a throw-away world. They want you to buy cheap products...often. Another problem is design engineers appear to be on LSD. The crap coming out of factories is amazing. I have repaired and improved many items rather than throw them out and buy again. For instance a wind cork screw with side levers. The plastic bottle seat broke after only a few uses. I had to design and make a steel bottle seat that works fine. I've had power transformers for things go bad and I had to hack saw them open to repair wires and diodes. Then tape them shut. I'm into function, not looks. I had a hack saw blade mounting hook break and fabricated one out of a coat hanger. Still works to this day.

" 'Tis better to spend than to mend," or so said George Orwell.

Try your local Ace hardware.

Hit or miss, too, imo....much of their stock any more is simply Ace-branded versions of the same Chinese imports as everywhere else.

The "real" stuff remains at the actual distributors for the most part w/ the odd local supplier or the internet/catalog store which has a wide enough market exposure to be able to hit the rare consumer who actually does buy something on other than lowest initial cost...

Speaking of nozzles, I just got one from Amazon for about $18. A little expensive, but it's supposed to have lifetime warranty (my lifetime I guess).

Anyway, it works very well. Just search Amazon for hose nozzles.