Organizing Tips

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by Jared341

1. Color coding is your friend.

Do this. We do this with our allen wrenches, and it is AMAZING. No, I'm not looking for a 3/16 allen wrench, I'm looking for a yellow. Hand me a yellow and a 7/16 [wrench], please.

I don't even KNOW the sizes of our allen wrenches (in the long run, that's probably a bad thing, but I'll figure it out soon), but I do know what color wrench I'm looking for based on what I can see of the bolt that I'm messing with. One year, we even went a step further and spraypainted the heads of our bolts that required a yellow allen wrench yellow.

It also makes finding the right size a lot easier. If you somewhat standardize the size of screwdriver* or allen wrenches that you need (we have five different colors of allen wrenches, "labeled" with colored electrical tape: blue, red, white, yellow, green. Anything else is metric and is just special), you know exactly which ones need to be packed. Color coding saves a lot of time in the pit. It takes less time to match purple to purple than it does to read labels, IMO.

I have seen a lot of teams use the rolling chests, and they work very well. I am usually the one from my team to go around asking for things that we suddenly need or forgot to pack, and I've noticed that teams that have those are typically very well organized. Be sure to label the drawers and put things back where they belong.

My team uses, for the most part, KoP-style bins. Our pit setup is rather unique. To keep with the team's black and yellow theme, we purchased nine bins that are very similar to the KoP ones. In the bins are similarly grouped items - one bin has wheel components, one bin has pneumatics, another has electronics, another has wires, etc. Our pit has compartments that the boxes fit in, and during the competitions, the boxes can slide in and out like drawers. We also have a pegboard and some boxes and other organization things that hang off of it.
Picture : http://gpgearheads.org/gallery/album14/9892_G (the pit is from 2007/2008 and used to be made out of our shipping crate, but our current pit is based off of this. I only have a mediocre picture of our new one. The pegboard is the same in the new pit)

During the year, the black bins are put up in storage, and the items that were in them go into the REAL KoP boxes, with similar items from years past. The boxes are labeled and placed on some industrial shelving that was donated to us.

For organizing nuts and bolts both in the pit and in the shop, we use bolt boxes similar to this one. The items inside are sorted by size and thread, and the compartments are labeled. We do have a separate box for electrical items.

Really, the keys to organization are to put things back where they belong, clean up regularly, and know exactly where that Wago tool or 1/4-20 bolt is.

*I don't actually know how this works for screwdrivers. If you can't tell, we use allen wrenches. The only things we use screwdrivers for are electrical components.