So a few of us came in and had a crack at assembling a shelf and moving a bunch of the electronics small parts bins onto it. Unsurprisingly they didn’t all fit. Now I didn’t prioritize what contents I put on this shelf, I just picked a bunch of our bins that collectively added up to a reasonable height that would fit within the width of the shelf. (looks like the remaining capacitors and resistors made it over though).
In fact, that entire shelf below it is also electronics components, It would be really nice if we could put hand tools and fasteners there instead.
So the question becomes, what is here, do we need all of it, and what do we want to do to store the rest of the stuff, and what organization system do we want.
I have also dragged a 5 drawer filing cabinet into the corner of the electronics area, so we can move everything that was in the two drawer SMD cabinets (currently residing in the woodshop).
One idea floated was to put up a new narrow shelf along the north wall (where the door slides in) set off from the wall to leave a pocket for the door to slide into, and cover it with bins.
I wonder if it would help to have a night of electronics nerdery in which we cull components that really are never going to be used and shuffle them on to another home. For example do we still have wax capacitors? Hopefully not. lol.
My problem is that beyond basic stuff like switches, caps, resistors, and leds, I’m not knowledgeable enough about other things to know what should go. Need some meatspace group nerdery for this i think.
Are other people game to have a hang out/sorting night?
Even with limited space like we had at the Bunker and Cook St I never thought electronic components neatly labeled in drawers/bins were a problem. Are we really that short on space at Venables?
I used to have some of these parts cabinets at home for electronic components and came to dislike them quite a bit.
They use up a lot of shelf space. They are wide and high, but don’t utilize depth. If you arrange them in any way that is space conserving, you can’t access them anymore (see pic above). Oh, and when you put them high up, browsing the cabinet becomes a pain, you have to remove each little bin to be able to look inside it.
Most bins tended to have only a few components in them, wasting space and yet there were never enough bins.
I ended up using simple envelopes. Basically, I got a pack of cheap envelopes from staples (back from the days when people wrote letters) and put components in them. They can be easily organized in drawers, vertically, like a file index (another thing of the past).
It turned out to be far more compact. Envelopes with only a few dozen components in it are so flat, they basically don’t take up any space.
It is also a lot easier to find components. The envelopes can be labeled, and browsing is considerably more convenient, just like a file index.
