Infrastructure

Infrastructure

A bit of tidying up and some infrastructure. First, scrap metal used to be in a slowly collapsing cardboard box. I replaced that with two wooden boxes made out of scrap:

These were quick to make and were made out of dinged wood anyway, so anything the scrap metal does to them is irrelevant. As well as being more sturdy than the cardboard version, they fill the space in the cupboard now:

so they can hold more bits and pieces.

The second thing I made was a tray to fit on the top of my drill press. I had used magnets to hold chuck keys and drill bits, but that was getting to be a bit messy and didn't work that well. I cut some scrap bamboo flooring to the same shape as the top of the drill press belt cover.

To stop the tray moving I 3D printed curved plastic edges that screwed to the flooring.

These stop the tray moving sideways and falling off the drill press. I put a piece of non-slip plastic on top of the drill press, this stops any sliding of the tray and should deaden any rattling when the drill is running.

On top of this I put a tray that will hold all the bits an pieces. It's plywood and more scrap,

and it totally screwed together.

How I will arrange what goes in the tray I haven't worked out yet, for now, the chuck keys are in a little area of their own:

I might put a drill index in there somewhere.

Drawer

The drawer where I keep my abrasive paper was making me sad every time I opened it. The paper was just piled in there and I was never sure what grades I had. So, with some time available for a re-jig, I reorganised:

There's a plywood frame with foam board  slots for each of the grades. I cut the paper sheets down to fit the slots, as I realised I never use a sheet without tearing or cutting it down, so why not just cut them up? Small foam board inserts hold the slots in shape and I wrote the grit sizes on them.
I'm not sad when I open the drawer now...

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.