Surface Mount Component Storage

 I've bought some surface mount components as they seem to be the way ahead. They make it easier to make PCBs as you can skip most or all of the process of drilling holes in the PCB, at least if you stick to single sided PCBs. The problem with SM components when compred to the old through hole components is storage. I ordered a bundle of resistors and a bundle of capacitors from ebay as a starter set. They are quite compact, but awkward to store in an orderly fashion.

One common way to store these components is in plastic wallets which are then held in a ring binder. The pockets are designed to hold components, either on a strip like these, or in a small envelope. i need to store strips, and having to delve around in an envelope seems a bit fiddly, so I looked for plastic pockets. Unfortunately they seem to be pretty tricky to buy and are expensive. Some people on the web have tried making their own pockets out of standard A4 plastic ring binder holders. This involves a soldering iron or a hot wire system to melt the plastic and build up smaller pockets. This looks a bit hit and miss and also quite a lot of work. So, I gave up on the pockets and stored the components in a drawer.

Until I saw this in a charity shop this weekend:

It's a (very old) photo album. It is a binder with card pages that have a plastic page on each side. The plastic sticks in a temporary fashion some tacky strips on the cardboard pages.

The idea is that you peel back the plastic and tuck your photos inside, under the clear plastic sheet. The tacky strips then hold the sheet down and stop the photos sliding about.

This is also ideal for holding the strips of surface mount components:

You can get quite a lot of strips on each page, I suspect too many would reduce the number of tacky strips that are available to hold the plastic, but 6 strips is no problem at all.

As the binders were designed to hold photos they have been designed to expand as items are put into the binder, which also means thst they can accomodate quite a few strips of components.

I managed to buy two binder of different exterior design but with the same tacky strip arrangement and I'll definitely be looking for more as I suspect they can be used to store things other than SM components.