When I started acquiring tooling for my shop most of it was from eBay, used and in lots. That let me get a wide assortment of tooling for the lathe and mill at a reasonable price. My general shop organization is the mill and lathe along the wall and tool roll-aways and chests behind me when using the machines. This makes it convenient to just turn around and fetch a different cutter, tap, or other item. This has worked well.
My only successful arrangement has been for drill bits. I made drawer inserts to hold bits of the same sizes and have them labeled and ordered metric, fractional, letter, and number in a contiguous sequence so that I can easily find a drill one size larger, etc. The solution is pretty "ghetto" being made out of craft sticks, but at the time I did not have money to do much else. I do not like the idea of the Huot cabinets because the break up the total order of the drills. My solution does have drawbacks around the different types of drills: jobber length, screw machine, extra long, flat end, Morse taper, etc. I intend to make a drill index block for the most common sizes including taps, tap drills and clearance drills so that I do not have to go tor the drawer for every drill.
You can see how easy it is to just turn around and find the drill I need for the lathe or mill. The same is true for taps and end mills.
Currently, all the specialty drills are in a separate drawer, and finding a specific size is not easy. The same is true for reamers because I do not have a full set in an index. (For most of my projects I can adjust the actual size of a feature to match the tooling that I have.)
The are many other collections that have the same characteristic, many duplicates and many sizes: different kinds of end mills (ball, 2 flute, 3 flute, 4 flute, tapered, rounded corner), 1/4" drive bits, hex keys.
As I now have a 3D printer I can print holders similar to the Lista inserts, and I can make it so that I can have just the slots for the sizes of items I current have and insert new holders for additional sizes as needed.
For some items, such as end mills, many of the new ones are in the shipping tube, but most are in just loose. I would like to somehow manage keeping track of new, sharp, usable for roughing and such.
The main idea that I would like some suggests for is how to separate spares from in use items so that one gets worn out at a time instead of having everything wear evenly because I am grabbing a random (drill for example) item each time.
For a while I had all the spare hex keys in ziplog bags and if I needed an addition one of a certain size I just searched through an entire drawer of bags. This was terribly inefficient.
For something like taps, the problem is that there are at least five taps of a given size that I want easy access to (taper, plug, bottom, spiral tip, and spiral flute) and then possibly a dozen or more extras in that size.
I have seen many photos of organizing these types of tooling, but they seem to mostly be a variation of the Huot Drill drawer boxes.
Thanks in advance for your ideas!
My only successful arrangement has been for drill bits. I made drawer inserts to hold bits of the same sizes and have them labeled and ordered metric, fractional, letter, and number in a contiguous sequence so that I can easily find a drill one size larger, etc. The solution is pretty "ghetto" being made out of craft sticks, but at the time I did not have money to do much else. I do not like the idea of the Huot cabinets because the break up the total order of the drills. My solution does have drawbacks around the different types of drills: jobber length, screw machine, extra long, flat end, Morse taper, etc. I intend to make a drill index block for the most common sizes including taps, tap drills and clearance drills so that I do not have to go tor the drawer for every drill.
You can see how easy it is to just turn around and find the drill I need for the lathe or mill. The same is true for taps and end mills.
Currently, all the specialty drills are in a separate drawer, and finding a specific size is not easy. The same is true for reamers because I do not have a full set in an index. (For most of my projects I can adjust the actual size of a feature to match the tooling that I have.)
The are many other collections that have the same characteristic, many duplicates and many sizes: different kinds of end mills (ball, 2 flute, 3 flute, 4 flute, tapered, rounded corner), 1/4" drive bits, hex keys.
As I now have a 3D printer I can print holders similar to the Lista inserts, and I can make it so that I can have just the slots for the sizes of items I current have and insert new holders for additional sizes as needed.
For some items, such as end mills, many of the new ones are in the shipping tube, but most are in just loose. I would like to somehow manage keeping track of new, sharp, usable for roughing and such.
The main idea that I would like some suggests for is how to separate spares from in use items so that one gets worn out at a time instead of having everything wear evenly because I am grabbing a random (drill for example) item each time.
For a while I had all the spare hex keys in ziplog bags and if I needed an addition one of a certain size I just searched through an entire drawer of bags. This was terribly inefficient.
For something like taps, the problem is that there are at least five taps of a given size that I want easy access to (taper, plug, bottom, spiral tip, and spiral flute) and then possibly a dozen or more extras in that size.
I have seen many photos of organizing these types of tooling, but they seem to mostly be a variation of the Huot Drill drawer boxes.
Thanks in advance for your ideas!
