I’ve been primarily focused on organizing drawers for the last few weeks which really means keeping the 3D printer running night and day making bins. Last weekend I realized that not having at least some organization in my office was making things less efficient so I added a counter that will ultimately turn into a mini-print farm but for now I need it to double as my standup desk for when I work from home.
The drawers will be used to organize all my inside hardware - network tools and hardware, computer/AV cables and cords, and anything related to hobbies of the past that I wish to revive at some point (e.g. RC cars, Arduino/electrics, etc.). The organization part will come in time as it’s not presently a priority except the drawer that supports the 3D printing. I’ll add some bins here and there to make my life easier.
Tooling drawers are coming a long slowly. Printing all the bins takes quite a bit of time. 8-10 of them, depending on size, can take 6-8 hours so I get about 3 runs a day. The method is to throw everything up on the counter and then determine bin size by sizing the objects to the grid and then determining how many ultimately I want or will have.
To some extent it’s guessing but it seems to be working nicely and will be much easier to re-arrange in the future if my needs change.
I’ve completed the move out of the drill bits smaller than 1/2” from the lista. It served me well but I look forward to using it for organizing other stuff which I’ll get to later.
The new solution is way better especially for the small stuff primarily because I can take out a bin and look for the bit I want instead of fishing with my fingers while trying to contort my head to see inside. Why not a drill index cabinet? I had one, hated it. It’s so constraining to quantity and I have a lot of some sizes and not as many as others. I suppose I could have used an index cabinet for the small stuff but again, can remove the tray.
Nothings finalized tho. I’m still adding and re-arranging so the spaces you see already are spoken for in some way or another.
On thing I’m intentionally doing differently is to separate the stub bits from the jobber bits. Most of the time I use the stubbies on the CNC mill because they’re the correct length to work offset-wise with end mills. So when I’m matching, it’s helpful to be able to go directly to the stubbies when I need one and though I’m giving up space, the time savings not having to dig I think will be worth it.
I have some other ideas for making bits easier to find but I’m still noodling so I’m keeping them to myself until I pick a path.
I haven’t messed with metrics much but create bins as I come across them in then drawers. Metric drill bits are interesting when you look at their decimal equivalents and compare back to the closest SAE bits. Here’s a good example: 6.4mm is .002 over 1/4” and F is .007 over…having options for tolerances is nice and metric allows that even if you’re not a metric fastener guy.
