There’s been a number of threads on shop organization and storage over the years, but there’s one thing I’m curious about that I haven’t seen explicitly addressed. What best practices exist for storing robot wheels? Caster wheels, pneumatic wheels, compliant wheels, flywheels, omni wheels, or basically any other round-ish object used to move robots or propel game pieces. Teams acquire them annually, and its often worth hanging onto quite a few for either future robots or at least future prototypes. My team’s wheel cabinet has been a continuous area of headaches and mess for a while, and there’s got to be better solution in terms of organization and space efficiency.
This is by far my favourite storage method for anything ever. I love how clean it looks. Everything 1619 does is just beautiful.
Image from the 1619 Instagram:
We keep all of the same type of wheel tied together on a loop of cord, and those loops are sorted into a few totes by type. It isn’t the most organized thing ever, but it’s stupid simple and space efficient.
We’ve done some pegs for them, but there are way too many for that to be reasonable. We ended up just stringing them up and hanging them from a corner of our storage shelves, in a corner that isn’t really useful for anything else. It’s not very attractive, but is fairly efficient!
We have large Lista cabinet full of wheels. It has dividers in it to organize the wheels by size, and type. It is pretty full now, might need to expand, or get rid of some wheels…
I’m in the process of trying to get bins to sort all our wheels. I figure some of the largish stackable bins should work. Right now we just have a couple milk crates and boxes all unorganized and it drives my ocd nuts. I really like the drawer idea but we don’t have a cabinet or even room for one to organize them.
