Small Shop Organizing : Surviving and Being Efficient in a Tiny Space

and ratchet bits sockety bits wrenchy bits smashy bits and grindy bits i know where everything is and it makes me laugh hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondiax today i want to talk about survival in a very small shop i don't have click springs talent but i do share one thing with him we both work out of shops that are a lot smaller than people realize because all of the photography is in real close on the machine tools my shop is tiny and i want to share with you some of the survival tricks that i've learned for working in a space like this and i think it might be helpful because i think a lot of you also have space as your primary limitation okay let's go this is my shop now you might be thinking that looks suspiciously like a toolbox and a workbench not a whole shop but in fact this is my entire shop as you can see here it's a 30 inch space that i have along this wall and also part of the front wall but i don't even actually have a place to stand here without moving one of the cars out of the way so at the start of my work session i move one car out and then i can work in this area and then if i'm doing like a big project then i might have to move both cars and then at the end of the session i put both cars back in certainly a hassle but working in a small shop is all about making the most of what you have and that's how i'm able to maximize the space this corner back here is pretty inaccessible because of how the cars line up and so this is kind of the first layer of deeper storage so i have things back here that i don't use that often like the engine hoist and also everything back here is on wheels so the hoist and the band saw and the grinder can all be wheeled out to where i can use them and where they are now none of them are really usable but it only takes a minute or so to roll it out so the drill press here is right at the limit of the space that's really accessible and i'm taking advantage of the space under it i store the welder down there and the vacuum as well so a small shop is really about thinking about your space in three dimensions you know every cubic foot is potential for storage or for usage and should be allocated as such so everything kind of below bench height is storage everything ab above head height is storage and everything at bench height is working area now obviously the big price that i'm paying for this three layer system of storage work area storage is that the machine tools have to fit in the work area which is not very big but of course you want your machine tools to be the largest ones that you can have so this is the largest mill that i could find that would fit in that space and you can see i've only got a couple of inches to spare above it when the head is cranked all the way up and similarly here the location of the lathe is such that i can access to the left of the headstock which is important but this is the largest lathe that i can fit in there and speaking of this corner because it's an l-shaped bench that far back corner is not very useful for actually working on things it's too far away so i use that for storage as well so again it's this concept of shallow and deep storage shallow storage for things you need frequently deep storage for things that you don't need as often so i have my arbor press back there because i don't use it very much and you know i have storage for emery paper and my chip shields and things like that so things back here are fairly easily reachable but it's too far of a corner to be active bench space you know when we think about shop space we think about floor area and obviously floor area is desirable and it's very valuable but if you can't go out you got to go up so i explicitly work at maximizing the vertical space in my shop so i build little shelves like this one over the workbench and a little shelf like this is great because it maximizes use of vertical space but all of the stuff on here is all stuff i use super frequently and so all of this stuff is still really accessible but it takes zero bench space and horizontal surfaces in the small shop are immensely immensely valuable so you really have to conserve all horizontal surfaces so i always think twice about setting anything on a bench anything that i set down i ask myself should this be hanging up should this be on a shelf should this be up somewhere the next key takeaway for small shop survival is creating hierarchies of storage so things that are smaller and that get used more often are in smaller bins over here so the grinding stuff and the welding stuff are in these little bins here and these are very easy to pull out so i can pull out this one bin it's got everything i need in it to weld my gloves and my magnets and my slag hammer and everything are all in there if i'm going to do some silver soldering my fire bricks and my flux and my silver solder are all in this bin right here and then in the center here we have things that are larger but that do still get used often like the rotary table the steady rest and so on and then the further into this dark corner we get the less often those things are needed so the scrap stock bin i go in there reasonably often the ratchet straps i use a few times a year and then way back in that dark corner there there's another bin hiding in there to use up the rest of that space up to the wall and that bin holds the really rarely used stuff the spare band saw blades and plastic containers and you know things like that that i want to keep but that only get used once a year once every couple of years another important principle on display here is access efficiency so these bins are all the sterilite bins and they're very slippery plastic and they're sitting on a piece of smooth plywood a solid shelf and that makes them very easy to slide in and out if the shelf was a metal grating or if it was a series of bars or something the bins would be difficult to get in and out and so you wouldn't want to do it and it would be a hassle these bins are sitting on smooth plywood they're smooth plastic they're easy to slide in and out and then down low everything down here is on wheels so that makes those things very easy to pull in and out this 5 gallon bucket down here is a more interesting story than it might appear it's upside down because it's actually my step stool i can pull that out and it's a very heavy duty bucket so it can take my weight no problem and i stand on that to access the upper level storage that i showed earlier if i had a step stool under here a step seal is just a step stool a five gallon bucket is a step stool and a five gallon bucket so as much as you can get multi-purpose things in here the better because that is doubling your storage effectively i've been talking a lot about maximizing use of space and oftentimes the key to that is custom furniture so it's not an accident that this l-shaped steel bench here is such a perfect fit for the space and for everything that i'm using it for it was designed that way and i went and bought all the steel and welded it up to solve exactly the problem i have so it's not an accident that you know these sterilite 70 gallon bins fit exactly in there and this rolling tool chest fits exactly under that l-shaped portion right there but luck is a factor too so the crypto cabinet over here was actually donated by a viewer thanks again glenn and it just happened to be a really good fit in this extra couple of feet that i had over on this side so that was just blind luck and then this main workbench here this was actually just a carcass that was in this building when i moved in it was abandoned by the previous resident and so i fixed it up repainted it and put this new grizzly work top on it so this was kind of adapted to the space that i had all these ideas that i've been sharing about hierarchical storage and maximizing space with custom furniture and so on they all apply on the micro level as well and that means inside your drawers just gotta wait for all the british people to stop laughing okay so here's a look inside my drawers now stop saying that so this is my lathe tooling drawer and no doubt the real machinists are laughing that all of my lathe tooling fits in a single drawer but that's life in a hobby shop you have to be very careful about what you bring in so all the same lessons are present here it's the topmost drawer which makes it the most valuable which means that it contains all of the most frequently used stuff and then you'll recognize the hierarchical storage that i talked about again the most important stuff is at the front of the drawer because very often i'll go in and pull something out without opening the drawer all the way all my quick change tooling for example and then in this back corner back here is stuff that i don't use that often spare carbide inserts and so on all live back there my turning between centers equipment is all back here because it's used relatively often but not that often so it's in the top drawer but in the back and then of course custom furniture you can buy lots of expensive drawer organizing systems plastic modular trays of various sorts or you can take a hot glue gun a whole bunch of cardboard boxes and a couple hours of your life and make something that's the exact fit for exactly what you need for example take a look at my tail stock tooling storage here i've got my dead center drill chuck and live center and they're stored end to end to make maximum use of the triangular profile of those components so there's an area a single cubic inch wasted here and being cardboard nothing is going to get damaged so how do you plan out an organization system like this well that word system is really the key we all know lots of disorganized people and what makes them disorganized is not so much that they don't understand how to organize a bunch of stuff it's that they don't understand that organization is a process and not an event they think that cleaning up is the same as being organized cleaning up is just hiding everything being organized is having a system where you know where everything is and everything always goes back in that place when you're done with it it's a process it's an active state of mind and lots of people grok that but the thing that i think a lot of people don't necessarily grok is that organization also has to evolve and that's a big part of why i like the cardboard because this is like the 10th version of this drawer every time you buy a new tool you know it has the potential to upset your system so two important things for creating an organization system are that it has to have room to grow and it has to have room to adapt so when i created space for my quick change tool holders i made sure there was four or five extra spots in here because i knew that i was going to buy more tool holders someday the other key here is after you've decided everything that you want to go in a drawer and you can probably get more in a drawer than you realize using this simple technique that is the same one you use when packing for a trip and that is you put the largest stuff in first so when i was laying out this version of this drawer the drill index and the reamer index went in first because they are big and i can't change their size or shape so i decided where i wanted them to go i wanted the drill index here because it's super frequently used i wanted the reamers there because they're slightly less frequently used and then everything else got filled around that an organization system is not just about tetrising everything in it's about categorizing things so that you don't have to remember where everything goes like let's take an obscure tool that i don't use that often a morse taper three to morse taper to adapter i have one of those very rarely use it so if i need to use it where do i look for it because i can't just remember where it lives the system tells me where that thing is likely to be it's going to be in my lathe tooling drawer it's not used very often so it's going to be in the back and it's kind of closest to tail stock tooling so it's going to be in that corner and there it is so i pretty much never used this thing but someday i'm going to need it and that day i'm going to know where it is because the system tells me how to find it now let's look at the next drawer down it's where i store my instruments i've talked a lot about storage hierarchy and the lathe tooling drawer demonstrated a lot of horizontal hierarchy but you also want to think about vertical hierarchy even in a drawer in order to maximize storage this drawer has a lot of vertical hierarchy in it so of course right on top here i've got my micrometers but underneath there is my depth micrometer i use that quite a bit less than the regular kind but it's still in the front of the drawer for relatively easy access similarly over here i've got my height gauge i don't use this guy that often so it's safely stored in styrofoam down underneath the telescoping board gauges and the radius gauges which i use much more frequently you'll also note that there's a lot of stuff stored on end if i had all of these different styles of micrometer lying flat they would take up the same amount of space but be much more difficult to access so standing them on end allows me more flexibility for using up dark little corners and also still makes them first order retrievable that's a phrase that adam savage uses a lot i like it a lot so this is all about first order retrievability and that vertical hierarchy even applies within a little bin like this this is all my layout tools so the stuff i use most often is on top and some of the weirder scribers and calipers and things that i use once a year are down below and then once again horizontal hierarchy on display here this is my spare indicators or indicator restoration projects that i want to get to someday so they are stored in this bin kind of way in the back where i'm not likely to ever need them but all the indicators that i do use very frequently are all right here in the front easy to access frequently without even opening the drawer all the way i can just crack the drawer grab an indicator close it again and i'll do one more drawer the mill tooling drawer that's a heavy one again here demonstrating both custom storage these are the little tubes that the collets ship in and i just taped them all together to make a custom storage solution for them and then over here i've got a commercial collet rack with extra storage so if i buy another half dozen collets it doesn't ruin my whole system so again adaptability and expandability are the keys to successful organization systems that's all well and good but let's look at a drawer that's less successful to see some of the pitfalls this is my tap and die drawer and there's a lot to be desired here i spent quite a lot of time making this custom tap and die holder but you can see i made several misjudgments here forgetting that you need a lot more room for taps right because you have multiple versions of each tap you have plug taps and bottoming and taper taps sometimes the second pitfall is that this is the opposite of the easily adapted cardboard that i talked about in the other drawers this was all meticulously routed out of mdf and then sealed with a waterproof coating and this tray was a lot of work frankly and so i'm kind of loathe to try to do it again or to modify it because it was such a big project to make this thing and you can see what the result is i have all my extra dies that i've bought since this was done just sitting in baggies and sitting in plastic containers and i'm just procrastinating on this whole area because i don't want to deal with trying to improve or modify this storage here now the other weakness here is pretty obvious there is frequently a tension between first order retrievability and maximizing use of space and this is a perfect example of that i opted to maximize first order retrievability i can grab any tap that i need instantly out of this drawer but look at the space i'm wasting this tray here is an inch deep and this drawer is seven or eight inches deep i'm wasting eighty percent of the space in this drawer with this tray i can't set anything on top of this because then i lose my first order retrievability and so i'm just wasting all of this space and in a small shop this volume right here is a lot of valuable space and i've tried to clog some of that back i screwed this tray here which holds the tap wrenches and my die stocks and so on but the other pitfall you can see in this drawer is the miscellaneous problem the death of every organization system is when you start to just stuff things into corners when you start to violate your own system the example of that is right here the fine folks at ptc recently donated this really awesome steel hardness tester for me very cool piece of kit but this is a fairly large item and my organization system does not account for it this is really an instrument but there's no room left in my instruments drawer and my instruments system was not designed with this in mind so the system failed so what did i do i stuffed it in the back corner of my tap and die drawer because that's where i had space and what has happened exactly what i just said is going to happen every time i need that hardness tester i do use it fairly frequently every time i need it i can never find it i can't remember which drawer that i stuffed it in the back corner of i go looking into my instruments drawer first because it's an instrument it's not there then i think well maybe it's a spare tooling this is kind of my uh less frequently used tooling so i go in there it's not in there i go into another cabinet on the other side of the shop there it's never in there i have to remember that it's stuffed in the back corner of the tap and die drawer which is a nonsensical place to put it so watch out for the miscellaneous problem unless you think i'm some sort of organization master check out this dirty dark secret not only do you want to avoid the miscellaneous problem you want to avoid the miscellaneous drawer so what do i have in here i've got some quick change tooling that i'm probably not going to use often but it's bulky so i literally had nowhere else to put it i've got a random assortment of high speed steel very useful but again didn't have anywhere else to put it a beautiful set of workshop grade gage pins that a viewer recently donated i love having these but again it's a bulky item and i just didn't have a space in my system because the system was designed before i owned these and then a random collection of spare parts for that quick connect tubing stuff so this drawer here total fail i'm so ashamed of that drawer i haven't even labeled it it i don't even know what's in it the drawer below it arguably even worse i actually don't even know what all this is that's my puller set oh this is an adjustable spanner oh it's another adjustable spanner and this is a great example of why organization is important right because i had this adjustable pin spanner that i bought for a need that i had coming up i forgot i had it the project came up in the queue again and i bought another one so this is total organizational fail i don't even remember now that i had these so if i again want a pin spanner and if i do think i have it i'm not going to be able to find them because they're buried in this unmarked miscellaneous drawer if you look at my nuts and bolts drawer here now a drawer like this can be pretty challenging to organize because if you've ever organized lego you know that there's a lot of similar problems and that's that there are a lot of vectors on which you can categorize a given lego piece and successful organization is all about choosing the right vectors so you could break down all of your lego pieces by size and color and shape and various other categories but if you break it down on every single vector you'll end up with a million trays most of which have a single piece in them and it's the same with bolts if i had a separate bin for every thread pitch and bolt length and stainless versus brass versus you know galvanized and every other possible vector this would fill an entire aisle at home depot so my quarter 20 hardware is a great example of having to choose the right vectors so i broke down the bolts based on long and short because those were two big categories that were obvious but i did not break it down by material so there's galvanized and brass mixed in here for example and that's okay because you can look in here and easily see the different types however stainless is hard to see in a mix of galvanized and other stuff so the stainless gets its own category over here but i don't have very much stainless i only have a couple of bolts and some nuts so all of the quarter 20 stainless gets its own little tray over here in the stainless area if you subdivide too much everything takes up too much space if you subdivide too little everything ends up in giant bins and you can't find anything and you're not going to get that right on the first try as i was laying out this drawer i redid whole sections of it three or four times another great example of that tension of categorization vectors is in hand tools so i've got safety bits twisty bits stabby bits and squeezy bits this system makes perfect sense to me just waiting for the laughter to stop but let's take something like a pair of scissors are scissors squeezy bits or are they stabby bits they're kind of both things right so i've opted to call them stabby bits because sharpness is kind of their raison d'etre however i often get confused by this and one time out of five i put scissors in the squeezy bits drawer i haven't talked a lot about labeling but you've no doubt noticed everything so far is obsessively labeled in my shop and that's not just because it gives me the good ocd feels but it's also an efficiency thing right so when someone else is in my shop they don't have to be asking me where everything is when i'm tired at the end of the day i don't have to think twice about where things go i can just zombiely look at the labels and when i need to very quickly grab a pair of pliers i don't have to again think twice about what drawer it is my eye just goes right to the squeezy bits drawer and i know that all my all my pliers are in here and it's a little thing it's just one second of not having to remember which drawer has the pliers in it or three seconds of having to open two drawers because i can't remember which one is which and but those two three seconds that adds up and so it's easy to look at a video like this and think wow you know how much time do you spend on all of that organization but that time is an investment because it pays back five tenfold on efficiency as you work so that's my little speech on small shop survival i imagine you all backing away slowly from me now hands in the air wary of my crazy eyes but i hope something in here was useful for you if you like what i'm doing throw me some love on patreon and we'll see you next time

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 73,292

Rating: 4.9326663 out of 5

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, small shop, organizing, shop space, garage organization, small garage, garage shop

Id: ODRkCdnYDbc

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020