Time for a spring clean? How's your workbench looking?

When building a project, I go thru my boxes and drawers to accumulate parts I might need. The leftovers from the project get thrown in a "to put back" box. Tearing a project down, the parts get thrown into the........"to put back" box. 

#1 - sort thru the "to put back" boxes, and put back into the labeled storage.  :-)

#2 - I also have large tupperware containers for project remnants. Once a year or 2, its good to re-inventory whats there, get rid rid of stuff that really is junk and scrap. Often I rediscover parts that I forgot about, do a memory refresh for upcoming projects.

#3 - mass recharge of all batteries. Get rid of batteries that fail to charge and Lipos that are swelled. 

cstanton To tidy things up a notch I am actually looking into inventory management systems to replace my spreadsheet based one but nothing suitable was found yet.

robogary said:

I also have large tupperware containers for project remnants

I sometimes feel like enclosures are effectively engineering tupperware. Feels like a missed marketing opportunity for all of the containers and boxes available.

Workspace organization is a continuing battle for me.  Due to a recent visit (Mother and Sister) I did a recent cleaning, so things are not as bad as normal, but still needing a bit of work.

depending on type of inventory - more suitable for equipment than components -  (self hosted) GLPI copy could be useful (maybe with some plugin for arbitrary types of equipment), but even spares/consumables could be tracked:

forum.glpi-project.org/viewtopic.php

I'm using the PC way, way more than a soldering iron : ( so have decided to re-do the spare room/office, to be as uncluttered as possible, so I can finally have a nice background for zoom meetings.

I know a lot of people have shelving in their background, but it starts feeling claustrophobic in a small space, so I've gone for a plain wall, but going to hang up some photos. Found this cool thing: https://www.hangingsystems.com/products/stas-minirail-installation-kit-1 

JWx I saw that one, it looks totally unadapted for electronics, looks more like a helpdesk and IT assets management thing. Price is also suited for corporate use, not home business.

shabaz Looks good. Same as the galleries and museums use but on a smaller scale.

For long while I've put parts for a new job into a "Job box" which I then keep ( maybe for 10 years or more). I might raid the job boxes for left over parts but it can get very hard to remember where things are, especially when parts get moved to more recent boxes. Eventually I purge very old job boxes.

In parallel I have always kept standard parts in little drawers or boxes.

I'm moving towards a system where all parts go straight into common storage and the job boxes only contain very specific parts like pcbs  -  this is because I waste too much time looking for parts that I know I have somewhere.

I've just added another 256 little drawers to the system (taking the total up to about 1750). The problem is finding wall space to put them. There is certainly no room for pictures in this space !

The latest 256 drawers. The labels were printed on a second hand Zebra TLP2824 printer which I paid about £30 for. Thanks to  shabaz for recommending them !

The previous batch of 128 drawers were a little larger and filled up in about 3 months.

You can see the carousel thing of drawers in the background. Its quite good but about 3-4 x the price per drawer and takes up a lot of floor space - so I won't be getting any more of them.

MK

michaelkellett You would need Rolling Archive Shelves.