|
A few years back I was at a furniture manufacturer auction and bid on a 36 drawer cabinet. The drawers are about 20" square and 3" deep. Got it for $75, thought it was a pretty good deal. All metal and clearly "homebrewed" by some machine shop at some point in history. The real fun part of the story begins the next day when I showed up to collect my stuff, this and another much smaller cabinet. The big cabinet mentioned above (which I failed to preview by somehow overlooking it) was COMPLETELY FULL of nuts and bolts. I had no idea. It wasn't until that moment did I realize just how good of a deal I got. Now, what to do with it, how to organize it. Had to give away 500# or so (what does one do with about 500 3/8 by 2 1/4" bolts?) to make room for my stuff. Most of the small stuff had become all jumbled up over the years, the big stuff was just plain poorly organized (the cabinet has most everything from 4-40 to about 3/4, mostly grade eight, nuts, washers, set screws, steel dowel pins, etc.., came out of a machine shop originally). What I found was large flat drawers are WAY more efficient than systems that lay against the wall. One drawer can efficiently hold 1/4-20 bolts that range in length from 1/2" to 10" for example. In the drawers you need to find a way to subdivide the contents until you have groups of about 10 to 30 pieces. In other words, if you have 40 1/4-20 bolts, about 20 each flat heads and bolt heads, seperate them. If you have a group of 20 that is mixed, then leave them together. Most of us in our amateur status of fixing things, have the time to sort through about 30 things, if you can find the group of 30 quickly. If you want to sort like home depot, you'll need that many little containers. Which provides a nice intro to my next bit of sorting philosophy. The little containers. My cabinet came with about 50 neat little rectangular plastic containers about 2x3x3. These are good for about anything less than 3" in length, thought they were neat and wanted more. Looked the world over and found they cost about a BUCK EACH. Not too bad until I figure I need about a THOUSAND of them! The things I have found CHEAP and effective are as follows: frozen orange juice concentrate containers cut off to 3" long. Heavy waxed cardboard with a metal bottom, round, so not completely efficient but FREE. 500 tablet tums containers (yep, got LOTS of them!) with the nect and top cut off work good. International Coffees containers. Little rectangular metal things, ask all the wives in the neighborhood to keep them for you. Diaper wipe containers, cut the lids off so they fit in my 3" deep drawers. Work great for 3/8 to 3/4 bolts about 6" long and shorter. I found washing machine detergent in cardboard boxes work great when you cut off the bottom 3" and reinforce them with a layer of duct tape (finally a good use for duct tape!). Cascade dishwashing detergent in the cardboard box works just as well. Can use both ends (pull out the metal spout and tape over the hole). The bottoms of windex, 409, fantasic, etc. bottles are sort of oval shaped and nest together side by side fairly efficiently in the drawers. The bottoms of round shampoo bottles work much like the frozen concentrate containers. For really small stuff (machine screws from about a #2 to #8, associated washers and nuts), buy ice cube trays from dollar stores or garage sales and cut them short enough to fit efficiently into your drawers (the end finger grips get in the way, so I just bandsaw them off). Then you'll have so many little holes it is efficient to sort down to groups a 5 items or so. Since these containers sit in a big flat drawer, they don't need to be so strong. Just good enough so you can remove the container to sort through it if it contains several styles of fasteners. If it contains all the same style and size of fastener, you'll never have to remove it. This system works so much better than little plastic drawers, or the bins that cantelever off the wall. I base my opinion (and we all know what opinions are like, hoping not to offend anyone here!) on the fact that I lots of them too! They do work pretty good for my little electronic parts and model airplane hardware, which both are very lightweight, unlike metal fasteners. Finding or building a bunch of large flat open drawers is not trivial, nor is finding or building a cabinet to put them in, but remember, you don't have to build dividers which really is a pain in the bazoo. By the way, my drawers are made of about 20 guage sheet metal, were brake bent and spot welded. They have only one divider through the middle (for strengh I think, a more substantial wood drawer wouldn't need it), making two compartments about 10x20" each, which provides for a lot of flexibility when I put my little containers in them. The container lets you grab a group to look through, rather than drawers with built in (some fixed, others movable) dividers. Some of these drawers weigh 30 to 40 lbs apiece when loaded. The cabinet is also metal, but could easily be made of wood, and the drawers fit very loosly into their slots. Sorry so long winded, hope this helps some, congrats on your big find, life is so much better with lots of hardward on hand! Tools
|
