Hello!
My team is sometimes having a hard time keeping the workshop organized, and we are looking for new storage solutions, anyone can suggest some ideas or share some photos of how you store things in your workshop?
thanks!
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For small parts such as connectors, gears, fasteners, and small hardware, trays with small removable bins, stored on shelves. Label the faces that are visible when they’re on the shelf. Similar to these, though there are plenty of different brands and sizes available:
https://www.harborfreight.com/8-bin-portable-parts-storage-case-93927.html
https://www.harborfreight.com/20-bin-medium-portable-parts-storage-case-93928.html
For larger parts like motors and controllers and wheels, open-top bins, again on shelves with labels visible while shelved. Similar to these:
https://www.harborfreight.com/large-clear-stacking-bin-67134.html
For even bigger parts, the totes the KoP comes in!
Check out these (and other topics) over the years (I searched on storage parts from the magnifying glass two items to the left of my avatar):
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I’ll just link my post from one of those threads, but we absolutely love these storage cabinets:
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We built a wheeled cart for our parts bins:
https://docs.team4909.org/guides/parts-organizer-build/
We used our laser cutter to make custom inserts for our toolbox to help make tools easier to find and put away.
https://docs.team4909.org/guides/laser-cut-box/
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We use a variety of storage, but we keep the bin types limited for consistency . Everything gets labeled. Labels are your friend.
Biggest pieces of advice to staying organized is to make it a team thing to help keep it cleaned up and always be tossing old things you won’t use.
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So if you wanna go next level - the eva foam floor mats harbor freight sells laser cut real nice and you can hot glue the rough face down to either another layer of foam or wood.
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Nice tip about floor tiles, we bought some 5s foam:
For the tools that we have fewer of and need a very clear home we’ve gone to the “next level”
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How did you actually cut out the outlines of the tools in the foam? Laser? If you did cut with laser, where did you get the outline models?
It looks very nice!
We changed our toolbox situation this year and are using something called Toolbox Widget to hold wrenches, screwdrivers, nut drivers, pliers, and files.
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We used to struggle to keep individual projects organized between meetings (we often expand to multiple rooms and then return everything to the robotics lab before we leave) and getting a restaurant style baking sheet rack has been extremely useful. Each project gets enough baking sheets to hold all of their components and returns their pans to the rack at the end of each meeting.
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Hands down the best investment this year for storage was @Peter_Matteson getting the team Milwaukee pack out storage. He also got foam inserts and cutout spots for each subteam’s tools. He also color codes the tools as well as a colored outline in the foam inserts. It’s made a huge difference for us in terms of kids cleaning up and keeping tools organized.
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Its a bit of a manual process that involves taking photos of each tool, cropping them, vector tracing them and adjusting the lengths.
Just threw this together with some photos and assets I had kicking around. Its a bit rough but shows our process:
https://docs.team4909.org/guides/toolbox-foam-cutouts/
Hope that helps
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Do you have any photos you could share?
You likely could have gotten away with using a scanner instead of taking pictures. That ensures you are more aligned with the surface you’re projecting onto.
At this point I think I’m pretty sold on just keeping around a million of the 6qt Sterilite boxes and making sure they’re labelled appropriately. They don’t fit everything, but they’re very good for all those things that fit between small parts bins and full KOP totes, which is a huge amount of things.
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Target has latching versions of these for about $4. The non-latching version is slightly cheaper as well.
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We swear by these. Great price when they are on sale and Home Depot has a variety of lid colors a few times a years. We use three categories of lid colors on our pit carts to organize bins by shelves and then by what they have inside.
Best cheap organizer out there for a team to standardize on. Without spending a lot of money on some heavier duty mini totes it is hard to find a reasonable solution to hold up to students. Its why we stay away from latch lids.
My personal favorites.
Not expensive, they stay closed, they make them in multiples of height, you can see what’s in them, and they stack great.
Here in the midwest, Menards stocks a bunch as well.
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We have a ~30 stack & nest totes that set on shelves. But that sometimes is too unsorted, so we had a bunch of 2 gallon zip lock bags that I can pre-sort into and label and then they just sit in the totes. Works well for medium sized stuff.
I have photos I can share on my other computer when I head home later or work from home tomorrow.
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