LK&O

A Railroad with Relevance

Workbench Overhaul – Part VII

Written By: Alan - Jun• 16•14

It’s been over a month since I posted progress on the workbench. Bet you thought I wasn’t doing anything, huh? Well, you would be wrong. I have been sorting and sorting and sorting and sorting and… well you get the idea. Two houses and 18 years ago I had on the garage wall parts cabinets chock full of electronics pieces parts. Thousands of little parts. The move to house #2 took its toll on the organization of the drawers. The move to house #3 pretty much wiped out any semblance of order in the cabinets.

All of the little plastic drawers from the new cabinets were laid out side by side on the workbench, on the layout, just about everywhere in the basement! One at a time I dumped the contents of each old drawer and set about sorting. Each little part one at a time. Just in resistors alone there must have been a couple thousand pieces. And my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I had to use a magnifying glass to read the color bands on those little rascals. One at a time I dropped each component into the appropriate new bin drawer and wrote the description on a legal pad. Every night for the past month I did this for an hour or two. At least until my fingers started cramping from handling the little parts. When finally finished I made labels for the drawers and put them in the new cabinets in an organized manner.

Finally I am done. Hurrah! Thank goodness too. I don’t know how much more sorting I can stand.

As seen in Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine November 2014.
ipad_MRH_Nov2014Continuing the organization effort, I made a small tool holder for the workbench. I’ll have some photos of it next post. It has the last coat of polyurethane varnish drying at the moment.

Some pics for you of all the sorted labeled goodness.

Share

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Comment

  1. Rob in Texas says:

    Alan you are doing fantastic work. In between various projects at our club house we are trying to do something very similar. We have been trying to condense and sort and departmentalize things for a while. we are making progress but not nearly as much as you. Thanks for your inspiration.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.