How do you store your drops?

Looking for suggestions on how to store my drops of material
I'm talking about
9"x8"x1" chucks of aluminium
10" of 1" round
small cut offs you save for small jobs.

I'm trying to get away from my five gallon bucket method. Hard to clean and look for material.

Need to make some 1" tapered washers and I know I have a 6" piece of 316 around the shop somewhere....

It's not much better than your 5 gallon bucket method, but I use shelf bins for the bits that will fit, and stack somewhat larger stuff directly on the shelves. Hand-applied stretch wrap to hold bundles together. Commercial shelving like Penco Clipper seems sturdy enough for two or three shelves (4" to 6" deep) of mixed steel and aluminum offcuts per 3' wide section. I would not load commercial shelving 7 feet tall with steel, however! Stuff over 3' long is stored on end in another area to minimize floor space. I make a practice of writing the material type, hopefully on an end that will be readily visible/accessible, with either a blick or a silver Sharpie, depending on material color. Tool steel/drill rod, I spray paint the ends red in addition to the Sharpie labeling.

I use a heavy duty filing cabinet, mine is a Cole 4 drawer. My advice would be to make sure it has quality ball bearing slides, the regular "office" slides will be a pain to open and close filled with stock.

Steel Flat bar and plate cut offs are in the bottom drawer, steel round bar tube and pipe are in the 3rd, all stainless in 2nd drawer, all aluminum is in top drawer. works well for me and the cabinet was $10 a couple years ago off craigslist

Wooden crates on a pallet. Use 1x4 or 1x6 and a pin nailer to make dividers. Definitely not pro-grade but its easily moved and totally customizable.

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We store some in 5 gallon plastic buckets, for a while I was selling "rems" (remnants, I was told in no uncertain terms that that is thecorrect name) on ebay, depending on the part length rems can be pretty long and hobby machinists love them as they don't need to cut them from long bar, not to mention not having to buy in full bar length.

But eventually that became too tedious. Many years ago an old machinist told me "Ya never thrown anything away in a machine shop".


So it accumulates.

Cheapest heavy-duty tool drawer/chest.
Stores couple of hundred pounds of cut-offs in easily organized manner

Machinist_max said:

Looking for suggestions on how to store my drops of material
I'm talking about
9"x8"x1" chucks of aluminium
10" of 1" round
small cut offs you save for small jobs.

I'm trying to get away from my five gallon bucket method. Hard to clean and look for material.

Need to make some 1" tapered washers and I know I have a 6" piece of 316 around the shop somewhere....

Click to expand...

Good luck with that...

My storage method..

I've got a wall of cubby holes, about 60 of those are full of material drops.
Each row is labeled.

55 gallon drums of 6061 drops(rems).

A drum for solid scrap steel that gets raided occasionally.

At least a dozen pallets and a few crates piled with material out in the yard.

Bunch of material just laying on the ground out in the yard.

There are drops stored under and sometimes on every single bench in the entire shop.

Every corner has material leaned up against the wall.. Most benches have
bits of material leaned up again them.

Material with certs gets put in one certain area downstairs, or in boxes upstairs.

And I have a 40 foot storage container that I've been migrating material to as I get time.

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If you find a fool proof method, let us all know.

Its so hard to throw stuff out, might need that 1/2" long piece of 3/8 diameter hot rolled A36
someday. Then again 10 years ago I had to order a foot of 1x2" 1018 to make a fixture... That
sucked.

Like PartsProduction, years ago when the recession came home to roost, I sold a whole bunch of
material, here and on E-bay. The home shop guys loved the flat rate boxes of random drops.
A bit of aluminum, some 4140, some 12L14, maybe a small piece or two of Ti, some 17-4, finish
the box off with some crap mild steel and leftover nylon and delrin, and out the door. Paid
all the bills here for 2 months doing that and it didn't even make a dent, and I've only
added to it in the past 8 years. The nice ladies down at the post office get a little mad
(and sore, literally) when you keep bringing them boxes that weigh 69.8 pounds.

I consider it my retirement fund, along with the scrap carbide.

I have 2 of these cheap and cheerful shelving units Clearance Garage Shelving - Value Shelving from BiGDUG UK for my plastic drops, which are mostly in cardboard trays and boxes etc etc etc.

At the last count (2 + years ago) there was £2,500 ($3,250) plus on them .....some of which has been sold for customers work, but I know there's yet more than there was

As a lad I was told - the profit was in the drop and off cuts, .......and 50 years on I still can't fault that statement.

We use a short depth shelving unit for 12 inch and shorter. We write the grade of material on the end and if there is room the rough size or the diameter. Works quite well.

The long stuff I can find, it's that little 12" and smaller that seems to disappear. I had a bunch of leftover 6" PVC left over from a septic tank project and cut that into 24" pieces on my cutoff saw. I put them on the shelves of a relatively sturdy shelving system with the ends sticking out about 6" or so. I used a ratchet strap to snug the bundle up and marked on the side of the PVC what was in each tube with a Sharpie. When you snug them up they seem to find their own order and nestle nicely. Not perfect but it saves me a lot of time hunting for a 6" piece of something or other.

You can hand a lot of those drops out at Halloween to kids. It keeps your shop clear of scraps you'll probably never use anyway, and you'll be helping the kids learn the phrase "WTF?" from their parents when they get home.

Limy Sami said:

As a lad I was told - the profit was in the drop and off cuts, .......

Click to expand...

Some of the most profitable ones were when we could turn something out of a supplied sample part, and sell that back to the customer.

Find a dozen similar or identical 5 gal. pails cut them off below the top ridges to make a smooth sided bucket. make a 3 angle iron frame boxes to hold 4 of them side by side. Stack them so the buckets mouth faces you, voila you've 12 containers facing you 17 to 24 inches deep. Threaten to fire anyone who doesn't end mark material you now have a good visual more or less of length and an identity of material.

manualmachinist said:

Some of the most profitable ones were when we could turn something out of a supplied sample part, and sell that back to the customer.

Click to expand...

Even better is this one, (you might need to keep up ) .........customer A orders parts which can be made from his drops which of course he's already paid for once.

Customers B&C order parts both of which can be made from the others drops - B's parts out of C's and vise versa, which of course have already been paid for - once, .........but B & C hate each others guts.

Meanwhile customer D has his parts made from A, B & C's drops, ...at a good margin for Sami, ..................only A, B&C think D the scum of the earth and spend their days ''dissing'' him left right and centre ...............which of course D knows, .................and doesn't give a toss.

partsproduction said:

Many years ago an old machinist told me "Ya never thrown anything away in a machine shop".

Click to expand...

That's any Irish home. Whatcha DOO is kick it around until it gets LOST.

Which is why neatnik started the thread, I'd suspect.

One thing when you can't find stuff you know you have. Another when you are operating from the carpark because the stuff you can't find has filled the whole space and pushed you out.

Plastic buckets, sheet-steel office file cabinets? youse guys working thinwall aloominum tubing, only? Or what? Steels need "more".

Pipe cutoffs, PVC. No, not the little 3" ones. Go find some serious diameters. Like the buckets, only heavy-wall so as not to crack, viewed croswise.

Steel pails. Salvaged or other. They dent. Badly. BFD. Pound 'em out once every ten years. Or not. At least they don't crack. Plastics will crack. Or even shatter. Salvage a container, discover that great strides have been made in Bio-degradability of plastics. I kid you not. Stuff ain't what it once was, and that is regulatory not-just-cheap. But that too.

Got space UNDER a bench? Shit gets in there, it never comes out, right?
Unless.. every box is on its own furniture dolly. Easy out, easy back in again. Bench is your dust-cover.

Finding s**t. Stash those tiny LED flashlights all over the place. Refresh with another pak now and then. They grow legs. No space ever has enough light where you need it, when you need it. No light handy? You don't even try to look.

Tempted to store angles, nested, to then nest rod in the vee, to stash tubing one smaller size inside the other? Don't do that. If it doesn't HIDE what you have, it will be too much nuisance to unravel. You go and buy new instead, then add the drops from it to the problem, not the solution.

Rust. Folk who use it a lot know VPI paper and cousins are sold in pre-cut sizes, in rolls, and in large sheets folded. Get some. Doesn't take much to put under drawer liners and into hoards of drops. Pays dividends. Otherwise rustyugly offends, no time to mess with, you again buy new, add its drops in turn to the problem, not the solution.

Set a max level to the "hoard"'. If it has not been used, it will not be. Until ten years, or two days after it is gone. That will always be the case, whether you never had ANY, or still have a hundred tons. "Never" if it is not gone. Shed it.

Thin it periodically. Use, sell, scrap, even give-way. Space wasted, lost convenience, sustaining a mental inventory .. in total .. usually cost more than it is worth.

Oh."Good intentions".

No matter how many times you re-do all this at multi-year intervals? It will not be sustained for long. The container system implemented will be empty. Shit is all over Hell like it always was. Container system has become a trip-hazard.

Just Deal with that. Go on PM, ask the other guys how they fail their good intentions.

Remember one rule. THIS... they will lie about far more readily than whether they can, or cannot hit dead-nuts on spec threading Osmium to #00-90 on a clapped-out 1918 cone-head with HCS tooling. EVERYBODY always has clean undershorts, right?

2CW