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Short/small material storage

jermfab

Cast Iron
Joined
Jul 25, 2013
Location
atlanta, ga
Hi all, I wanted to share my solution for storing smaller pieces of material, too short or small for the saw rack. I made these entirely from scrap and they work really well to keep things fairly organized and accessible:
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They live behind the saw, closer (marginally) than my full-stick material rack in hopes the guys don’t cut from a full stick if they don’t have to.
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Like everything in my shop that isn’t on wheels, they’ll pick with a pallet jack or forklift for cleaning or rearranging.

It’s not the sexiest and may not work for all, but I just wanted to share something that’s been working for me.



Jeremy
 
Nice organization. Shouldn’t I see a material spec written on each piece? You know, 1040, 6061 etc.? Then you would be truly organized.
 
My partner and I hosted an art festival in 2015... that’s where the mural came from.

The few bits worth marking are marked. Theres a pocket with 4130 and 4140 prehard pieces that are marked. Beyond those it’s mild steel, aluminum and a bit of stainless. I do my best to group stuff by material and profile. And I hold onto all the short bits of heavy mechanical tubing I can get.


Anyhow... it mostly works...



Be safe and stay healthy




Jeremy
 
I've done with hot melt glue and cardboard shipping tubes that are a pain to get rid of. A stepped plywood box has worked best though.

At my last job I built a materials rack from pallet rack uprights and short pieces of the beams that clip on. It is hard to beat pallet rack material for cost. The base was pallet rack beams welded into a big rectangle. The rack uprights were mounted as a A-Frame leaning against each other. 20 ft lengths of material on the one side sitting on the arms made from beam ends.
A set of arms with rollers in the rack that feeds the big band saw. The back of the rack has sheet storage on the one end that holds 4x8 sheets on end, shorts in the plywood stepped box in the middle, and the last third is vertical storage for 10' material like Unistrut, electrical conduit etc. The base is decked over with plywood and the area under the bandsaw rollers is used to store small slabs of metal and plastic. The very top of the rack has double arms and a deck for pallets of material. Last the frame has short legs that allow the whole rack to be moved with two pallet jacks if we ever found the need. Wish I had a pictures!
 
i use fire work "bases" of different sizes, basically cardboard tubes glued together. sometimes beverage crates are handy, you can also put cardboard tubes in them.
 
If you have or if you can borrow a banding tool, you can band a vertical stack of large PVC pipes of different sizes together in a quantity that will provide a solid base.
 
The mural had to stay with the old building, but the short material holders came with. They traveled well enough and got some big brothers last weekend:
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The A-frame was my original long material rack…

I just never got around to building the additional sides to make the whole deal work.

The one-sided parts fell into my lap and I think they’ll work a bit better.

A-frame isn’t worth its value in scrap, so it’s not leaving the premises, but it can stay somewhere not under foot until next needed.


Y’all be safe now




Jeremy
 
How do you guys decide how small a piece needs to be before you chuck it? My organization of just pile it against the wall does not work very well.
 
I’ve spent the last couple days thinking about that very question.

Size, shape, SPACE, material and and frequency of use all have to be considered.

Under 3-4 feet of 6x6” box tubing isn’t much good, while the same length of something like 2” bronze might be a lifetime supply and well worth hanging onto.

I tend to start culling tubing and pipe around that 3-4’ length. I’ll keep a couple small pieces of commonly used profiles and ditch the shorter pieces.

For material that’ll more likely end up in chuck or vice jaws, once it’s too small to hold it goes.

And every now and again I just get tired of looking at some piece of something weird that was bought for a specific purpose and toss it in the scrap bin. My next scrap run has a couple of feet of 3”-Hex in a free-machining alloy that doesn’t weld at all.

I bought that material several years back to make pin-drivers for a jackhammer and haven’t done anything but move it since.

It’s worth more than scrap to somebody, but they haven’t walked through the door asking about it yet and I’m tired of looking at it.




Be safe




Jeremy
 








 
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