Some day I will make a super long response to this thread because this is my PASSION…but today is not the day
Our solution to this was to make all of the wrenches dual-color. This photo is not great (a lot of them are missing colors because the paint wore off) but it’s the only one I could find. The wrenches are colored with the allens that correspond to the button and socket head bolts used with that wrench size. Orange for 1/2" is kind of the exception because we typically don’t have 1/2" nuts (we more commonly use that size to hold/turn a hex shaft), but orange was chosen for that size specifically because we don’t have an orange allen.
This drawer is in our competition pit tool cart, which is why the placards are there, and the 11/32 one is actually outdated (we replaced hot pink with lime green about a year after we painted the original placards). Also, ignore the blue silicone tape on all of the wrenches, that’s just to designate them as the competition set.
Here’s a cross-reference of our current system.
The goal was to make it extremely clear which color was which even in poor drawer lighting, which is why there isn’t an orange (easy to mix up with red) or a purple (easy to mix up with blue). As mentioned above, 3/32 was originally a hot pink color, but apparently that was too visually similar to red and led to a lot of confusion. The lime green works a lot better despite us having another green - I think it works because the two greens are two COMPLETELY different sizes, and the “regular” green is pretty dark already.
We don’t use a lot of nut drivers so we didn’t even take into account the “standard” colors of those. Our socket sets are the colored harbor freight ones but those also have the same issue as was mentioned earlier with each wrench/driver having multiple allens associated with it, unless you’re a socket-head or button-head -only team. I actually JUST added paint to the nut drivers and sockets in the competition set before worlds this year.
We tried using colored heatshrink and colored electrical tape for allens previously, and I wasn’t a fan of those methods. Heat shrink cracked or slid off too easily, and electrical tape left a residue if it came off. Paint seems to work OKAY…it’s not the best but it’s not the worst. I saw the best results with the original paint we put on, which was from a Testors acrylic jar set that I haven’t been able to find since, and nothing else has compared with longevity. I’d estimate that we have to re-paint about annually (hard to track since we do some as-needed repaints), but that’s still lasted longer than tape or heatshrink.
For reference/to address the original question of the thread, for drill bits, we paint the bottom (flat) end of the drill bit and store them in a small parts drawer organizer like this (I wish we had a nice drill index cabinet but honestly, this works perfectly fine). I don’t think that our students have memorized this as well as they have the allens/wrenches, but if anything, the color coding here makes it a lot easier to put bits back in the right places because you don’t have to try and read the (likely scratched) etching on the bit.
