How does your team store their aluminum tubing or other long robot building materials?
We currently use the sophisticated method of leaning it against the wall in the corner of the room. This works okay…until someone tries to get a piece and the entire stack falls over. So we are looking for a new way to store our materials.
Anyone have any suggestions?
We built the attached cart, which holds stock of different lengths vertically. Works well as long as you’ve got enough ceiling height.
Our team uses recycle rush cans. Only thing they’re good for. /s
We recently cleaned up all of our stock storage and we’re still working on everything else we have (the pneumatics cabinet is an absolute mess…). It’s unfortunately seen many years of what I would call neglect, but with a bit of time and effort the space is shaping up to be amazing again.
We’ve had the vertical racks for a while but it was always really disorganized. It starts with steel shaft and bar, goes to conduit, then aluminum rounds, bar, plate, tube, channel, and other smaller pieces of various types (all organized) are on the small shelves behind.
103’s Stock Storage https://imgur.com/gallery/mRmrhbc
Edit: To be clear, the first two pictures were in-progress pictures when we began sorting and organizing all of the stock we have accumulated over the years.
3946 has some custom-brazed unistrut “stock storage racks” inside the storage shed. These were originally built for the on-campus portable building we were using in 2016 and 2017, and moved over when we relocated to Ninth street. These feature three “arms” sticking out at about 30 degrees above the horizontal brazed to uprights, which are lag-bolted to the 2x4s in the wall. The arms are covered with PVC pipe for reasons I never really understood. You can see them along the right wall in the attached picture, holding up a lot of wooden and aluminum (and a bit of steel and PVC) stock. Pieces shorter than 8 feet are stored vertically to the right of the long stock racks; that is almost entirely polycarbonate tubing, and aluminum tubing, channel, and angle.
The big rolls of carpet are stored at floor level under these racks when not in use for practice (this photo taken 1 Mar 2018, between bag and competition for POWER UP; we had another garage set up as practice space at this point).
Edit: The solutions above or for pieces more than about three feet long. For medium-lengths (1-3 feet), We have cut 12" lengths of 1-1/2" to 4" PVC pipe and stood them up in an open tote (not the KoP/Rush totes; these have vertical sides), larger pipes to the back, and used that as an organizer. Pieces shorter than a foot have been stored in shelf bins (~6" wide, 15" deep) and in relatively flat boxes/trays at different times.
We recently built a new metal storage rack, mainly for tubing/extrusion in our shop and are in the process of doing something for larger flat stock closer to the router.
This design allows us to:
Our team bought one of these racks and it works great:
https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/storage/bulk-rack/bar-sheet/vertical-bar-rack-39-w-x-24-d-x-84-h-3000-lb-capacity
We welded together a cart with some thin steel. The left side has different “levels” to accommodate various lengths of angle, extrusion, rods. The “bins” on the right are for short pieces, but keeps them organized. The back allows for sheets of aluminum and polycarbonate to be stacked as they lean up against the expanded steel.
Here is a link to the STEP file as we drew it up in Fusion 360.
These racks are nearly identical to the ones we have that I posted above. They are absolutely awesome, but I would recommend putting some kind of bumper on each of the angle ends that are sticking out. I bumped my head once and decided that was enough. We found some extra tennis balls in our field building and put them on the corners and that has prevented many inguries.
We store ours horizontally on a shelf that’s about 8 feet up, end on.
We’re not very good at organization, but this is one choice that works well for us. If you think about it, you don’t really need to access the storage all that often, and it’s not like you’re going to be digging through it to find the piece you need when you can see the end profile. So, it makes sense to keep it out of the way.
the one place it doesn’t work all that well is shaft stock – shaft stock does get used more, and tends to be smaller and shorter than the 59" pieces up on the shelf.
(Anybody know why the standard appears to be 59"? I thought it was something about shipping, but now I’m not so sure. With UPS and Fedex, you can ship a 6"x6"x106" box without it being considered ‘oversize’)
We ended up coming up with a solution for storing our aluminum tube and other building materials. It isn’t as elegant as what others have shared, but it gets the job done.
Basically, we had this wooden box from a project back in our FTC days. It was just taking up space so we decided to make use of it. We cut some slots out in the top to hold 1"x1" and 1"x2" aluminum as well as some holes to hold hex shaft and churros. It works rather well, and definitely helps us be more organized.
Here are a few pictures.
For the amount of space we have, this is a great solution! We’re needing a better solution too, and while I like a lot of the big wall storage and carts and such, it’s just not practical for us right now. I like this, and haven’t seen anything quite like it. I like how the slots keep everything lined up. I might have to build something similar.
