I am not new to Cheif Delphi (This is just a new account for the new team) or new to FRC (10 years), but I am new to running a team. I am running a team out of SoCal (Mechalodons) and we are a 2nd year team.
We now have accumulated plenty of parts and such. The other head mentor and I are a little over our heads in organization of stuff. I was hopping to get tips, tricks and ideas from other teams to keep things organized well.
Stuff like awkward shaped motors, bunch of different length (used-ish) wires, wood of all shapes and sizes, and etc.
We have a good size tool box as well (Pictures to come), but how do teams organize those? How do they keep tools from going everywhere when moving to and from competition?
I am really really appreciative of anything you lend help with!
For used/short wires, we currently use a set of plastic drawers, with each drawer being for a different wire gauge (or two). Much better than just throwing it into an unorganized box!
One of the ways we organize some of the stuff we have is buy putting it in some of the kop style totes. We have one for motors which has kinda turned into the tote of old motors, another for gearboxes, another for vex parts, and so on, it helps to be able to go pull a tote out of the back room and have what you want in that box. For wires sort through the pieces of wire you have and determine what you want to keep and scrap what you don’t want. As for the wood what we did at the end of 2015 is we took out all the wood we had in our back room and sorted through it piece by piece and got rid of most of it. Actually you may want to designate a tote for scrap metal, this way you can put all metal scraps you have into a tote, including the wire scraps and then at the end of the season take it somewhere to recycle it. As for the tool box we label drawers with that we want to put in them and then we place the tools in an orderly fashion into each of the drawers, I’m not sure if we have had issues with tools getting really messed up during shipment so I can’t help with that part. Organizing though has more to do with analyzing your space and then determining the best way to fit stuff into so something I suggest that works for me may be a bad solution for you and vice versa.
For tool boxes, we use stickers of the tools silhouettes that’re supposed to go in there on the drawers. The neat thing about this is that even if you don’t know what the tool’s name is, you can still put it away.
With wires, I recommend that you get a wire spool for anything super long (6+ feet), and then keep the other wires in compartments sorted by gauge and color.
In our school’s shop, we have several rows of shelves that have labeled plastic boxes for just about every item (e.g. “0.25 Sprockets - Small”) that make it easy to find and sort things.
With large amounts of wood and sheet metal, we don’t bother with boxes and just keep them on a rack. Same for long aluminum tubing.
That’s all I can think of for now, but I’ll make another reply if I remember something else.
My team does similar things as mentioned with materials storage, like using old KOP totes to hold like things such as wheels, pneumatics, motors, gearboxes, etc. For wires we have stacked drawers with marked gauges with most unused wires held together so we use up what we can reuse before using new. For our 12 awg scraps we actually have a cleaned out Christmas popcorn tin since our spool fell apart and we’ve used it for five years now. You can never go wrong with the addition of labeling things to make it that much easier.
What I love about my team is that we work straight out of our toolbox/pit accessories. We’re thankful to have a room in our school with enough space that we actually keep the layout of our pit set up year round! It helps so we know where everything is when we get to competition so you’re not scrambling to find things. Tools are primarily always kept in there minus things like drills (they charge on another wall) and electrical (which is on a separate table until we pack up for comp). We even keep out battery cart right where we normally do in our pit and just use older ones when practicing.
There’s of course tools that’ll be left out just for convenience while building. I’m still even lazy about putting the typical stuff back every night during build season. We used 7/16 wrenches for the thing that broke most common last year we made it easier to differentiate with yellow electrical tape around the handles to be identified. We just make sure to clean up and put things back usually after our meeting on Saturday just so it’s where it should be the next week. Having a pack list ready to go when you’re ready to leave is always a good double check, too.
My team recently purchased a metal wire rack on casters that we have brought to competition in addition to the toolbox. On this rack we have have around 10 husky totes. These are medium sized and each one has certain things in it. For example we have one for motors, one for electrical, one for VersaPlanetsry parts and etc. We also keep 2KOP style totes on there. One holds all of our drive stuff such as controller and the other one keeps all of our books.
In our workshop we have tons of shelves to keep everything kind of organized. One thing I recommend is going through some of your scraps and asking yourself can we use this again or is is just trash. We did this last year and found that all the small worthless pieces reallyer cluttered everything
Shelves and bins and drawers of different sizes, a labelmaker, and two deep cleans a year plus some smaller ones.
When you find a bin is too full and you don’t want to toss stuff out, split the bin. For example, our “Versaframe” small parts bin separated into “VF Gussets” and “VF Bearing and Motor Mounts” about a year ago. Store less used bins (throttle motors, old control system parts) on the higher or harder to reach shelves.
We have found having a single “misc” drawer/bin in each general area useful; things tend to wind up there rather than the wrong place, which makes the cleanups go quicker. Go through the misc drawers much more regularly than the whole shop; we try to do weekly during build season and monthly the rest of the year. The one at the smallest set of shelves (electronics) reads “This looks important…” which seems to get more appropriate usage than “Misc” or “Etc” Or maybe it’s just that the kids who do electronics are (on average) more thoughtful on putting things back than the mechanical team.