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good compact storage system for grinding mandrels?

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Diamond
Joined
Sep 25, 2011
Location
Garbsen, Germany
I've picked up a haphazard collection of about 100 grinding mandrels, ranging in size from 6 to 40mm (1/4" to 1 1/2"). Is there a decent way to store these that keeps them organised but doesn't use a lot of space? There's also a bunch of weird sizes (24.23mm, for example) which are only good for grinding down to some size that is needed. So a storage with some flexibility to account for new mandrels and changes in size of the old ones would be good.
 
Tool cabinet with shallow drawers, just laying them flat and next to each other, sorted by size? It's what I do for my collection of MT shank drills.
 
Here is what I came up with. This is made from 4 pieces of PVC electrical conduit, cut up on a table saw and glued together, with some strips of 2mm material as floor and dividers. It's tough, lightweight, won't rust, and makes it easy to find the closest mandrel to what I need. I used glue meant for PVC plumbing pipe, which welds the parts together:

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Oh, I like that. When I decided to sort out my couple hundred pounds of horizontal milling cutters, I chose by their IDs several sizes of SDR (non-Schedule) PVC pipe and got some 1/4" and 1/2" expanded PVC sheet. I cut the pipe into lengths to fit the width of my tooling carts and cut them into half-cylinders. I cut rectangular blocks of the expanded PVC for feet, 1/4" for endcaps and 1/2" for middles, flycutting OD-sized half circle notches on the top edge of the middle feet, then glued the half cylinders onto the feet. Quick "troughs" sized for 3", 3.5", 4" and 5" OD cutters. The relatively small number of larger cutters lay flat in shallow cabinet drawers.

You can see some of these in the collapsed cart in the attached photo (which was obviously not taken to show off the PVC troughs).
 

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Hi, Tim here. what about a piece of Styrofoam that could fit in the drawer of your tool box, or what ever is handy. Simply push the mandrel down into the material--if you want, drill holes the size of the mandrels. Store them with stones up so that you can readily see size and shape, grade of stone etc.. You can also group them by mandrel size and length--allowing for the drawer to be able to close. Just a thought.
Have a great day
 
Hi, Tim here. what about a piece of Styrofoam that could fit in the drawer of your tool box, or what ever is handy. Simply push the mandrel down into the material--if you want, drill holes the size of the mandrels. Store them with stones up so that you can readily see size and shape, grade of stone etc.. You can also group them by mandrel size and length--allowing for the drawer to be able to close. Just a thought.
Have a great day
 








 
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