A minor storage crisis

I’m sure you who have your own workshops have had this sort of problem, too. I made something about 15 years ago that has served me fairly well, but suddenly because a serious pain point.

This was the original unit:

As you can see, it’s kind of a mess, and that was right after cleaning up for a shop photo! But it worked, mostly. Until. that is, about halfway through Amy’s desk when the side-mount drawer slides on the right side gave out under the weight of too much hardware (and an ill-fitting slide) and dumped the contents on the floor. That then reminded me of another annoyance, which is the shelves are all held in by pins, but those pins were too far from the front and back edges of the shelves — they were really, really easy to tip either way, especially with something like the Domino or the biscuit joiner, which are heavy.

I piled the hardware back into the drawer and left it sitting on the back table while I finished Amy’s project (and Connie’s), by which point I had an appetite to solve more than one problem. But one at a time.

I won’t make a major production out of this, but I did solve those two problems. I took the other drawer out of the right side, removed everything else that was in there, and made a large bank of hardware-sorter drawers:

I started with one DeWalt case (top) and one Stanley, and tried them both out. The Stanley is a tiny bit smaller (about 1/2 inch) but cheaper and a little easier to open and close, so I got 5 more of that one. Apologies to anyone who can’t stand the site of the one different unit, but I just couldn’t bring myself to throw $35 away. The only thing missing here, now, is labels — and I’ll be taking care of that soon. But now all the miscellaneous hardware from the original drawers is in these, along with all my screws, knobs, furniture and cabinet hardware, etc. in one place. It’s making my life easier already, and I’ve only had it about 2 weeks.

Of course that means finding a new home for the biscuit joiner, plastic, etc. that used to be stored in the right side. I did some major cleaning out and reassessing some of the things I was keeping unnecessarily — for example, my PC690 router is now permanently installed in my CNC, so there is no point in having four bases for it. After doing that, I reinstalled the original drawers on the left side, and then added three more:

The bottom one is deep enough for my Domino and the actual dominos that go with it. I mismeasured the biscuit joiner, which ended up being 1/4″ too tall unless I get rid of the storage box, so the other two drawers are filled with drawer slides and things like that. I moved a lot of the stuff out of the large central drawer into the drawers on the side, so that I could take advantage of the width of that center drawer for things that haven’t had a good home before, like my Katz-Moses box joint jig and the drawer-pull installing jig that are too awkwardly long to fit in any other drawer. There is still a fair amount of room in that drawer that will probably get used soon enough.

As you can see, these are a different color from the original drawers and have a different pull. I didn’t have any matching pulls, and the color I used originally is long since out of production (it was called “Classic Burgundy” by Rustoleum). I probably could have found something closer, but I already had that red so I used it. I planned on repainting the other drawers and replacing the pulls to match, but then I realized that I had glued those drawer fronts in place and the spacing for those pulls is wider than the others. It will probably stay this way until I can’t stand it anymore, and then I’ll probably have to empty the drawers, plug the screw holes, repaint, and install new pulls.

That solves the immediate problem, but now it has me looking at some of the other things in the shop and thinking of how I can add useful storage and bring some order to my wood storage, which right now is all over the place. The solution is going to involve getting rid of my 10-year-old rolling storage cart (which almost never actually gets rolled anywhere) and buying a vertical wood rack. More on this as it happens.