Gathering all the parts that I’ve been able to is only half the battle. It does absolutely no good if you can’t find what you’re looking for. ”Phase-One” of organizing involved three sets of those little plastic drawers — actually each had 30 small drawers and 15 larger drawers. While I did manage to get a lot of stuff into labeled drawers, the variety of parts far out-numbered the number of drawers available, so what to do now? ”Phase-One-Alpha” — I had a pack of those little manila coin envelopes and found that the bottom two inches of a cereal box worked great for storing those. Even still, finding what I needed and knowing what I had was still not always easy.
On to “Phase-Two” — I had five plastic hobby boxes (clear plastic with dividers, about 14″wide x8″ deep x 2″ high). I used these initially to sort out and inventory parts for kit’s I built last spring (Elecraft KPA100 and KAT100). About a month ago I started using these instead of the coin envelopes. I was bummed when I went back to Home Depot and found that they stopped carrying them. I finally figured out that the fishing section at Walmart sold similar boxes so I picked up some more.
I’m able to see what I have fairly easily and lay my hands on things pretty quickly. Now if I could learn to control the chaos of my workbend and assembly bench areas, I’d be in good shape!