Hey everyone. How do your teams organize and store your various COTS items? (Wheels, Gears, Sprockets, Belts, Chain, etc). Looking for some inspiration for my own team.
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We have 2 closets w/ rollable racks that we roll out in order to access our COTS items. Our system is a color-coded and lettered system. So motors, gearboxes, speed controllers, etc usually go in section A, and each one is assigned a color corresponding to a row on our racks. And we do this for pretty much everything we have. The containers used are standard small plastic boxes and larger items, it goes into another bigger plastic box. Not sure if I explained it well enough
We made these last summer and have been very happy with them
It’s just pieces of all-thread glued into holes in some 2x4s. But this allowed us to take our boxes of unsorted gears, pulleys, sprockets, etc and make it easy to see how many of each size we have.
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Could you provide a few pics if possible? ty!
Throw it all in boxes with “bad?” on the label. Ideally sharpie and blue painters tape for the label.
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Now we just need a belt budget 
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Very Thrifty.
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If I get the chance, I will !
We keep most of our 6 inch or bigger wheels on PVC pipe racks like that. Then we have 2 small bins divided into 3 sections each for the remaining smaller than 6 inch wheels (traction, compliant, Omni, mecanum, custom tread and finally casters)
The racks really are nice and you can make racks for the smaller ones too, we just decided bins would take up less space.
The cabinets these are in are from Uline and can hold bins of various varieties clipped on the sides. We use those for shaft collars, hubs, gears, bearings, etc. They were not cheap and you can get non-uline ones for much less
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Wall of Wheels.
going to put the belts in that empty space, probably a similar thing to what 118 did
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We would if we could but don’t have the wall space for that.
That or in our case the walls are cinder blocks and the school doesn’t like permanent fixtures on the walls. So we can’t “hang” peg boards. Instead we plan to build freestanding racks with pegboard and make sure they aren’t overloaded too much on one side or they’ll tip.
From the Wall-E goes to worlds Travel-log.
The REV booth at world’s had these to demo the FTC control system, but those type of peg board stands could be made out of 2x4s as opposed to the extrusions if that’s what you have around and aren’t looking for portability between multiple venues nessecarily. If you had a series of these on wheels in your lab with all of your belts and other hangable items it would be fantastic! You could move it right to the work areas in the shop as needed and then move it back to storage/out of the way later.
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I’ll note that this particular arrangement isn’t good for belt life. Given that we usually shred belts in FRC that might not be an issue, but squeezing the ends into such a tight radius is very frowned upon irl. Pegboard-like system is the right move there though.
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How are the PVC pipes attached? Just glued in or is there hardware holding it?
Dab of hot glue on the inside of the holes to keep it from spinning in place, then cotter pins on the end to keep it from sliding side to side.
Reject shelves, embrace the 3512 wheel carousel:
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we have 3-5 bins of various wheels sitting in our closet. We just don’t have enough space to have anything nicer
I’ll get around to posting the CAD for this and the GT2 version soon if I can find where on our server it is buried.
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Same here! I’m looking at all of these posts where people have SPACE. We are currently trying to come up with some ideas on how to more compactly store everything as opposed to making it look pretty. Im halfway through re-organizing our “closet” (that is a generous term) and it is amazing all the 10+ year-old goodies we have found behind boxes behind boxes.
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