Organizing Strip Material

Organizing Strip Material
Basswood
TOP: I went to clean out my shed/workshop and found I had piles of stripwood, brass, wire, balsa wood, and plastic laying loose and unorganized. Here is the basswood brought indoors and sorted out on my train table. I knew something had to be done to get the situation under control. RIGHT: This is what this article will show you how to do, and that is, create a tube storage farm.
	I found two types of tubes. On the left is a 3M brand I bought at FedEx/Kinkos and on the right is from the post office. The post office tube cost less and is far heavier than the 3M brand.

The 3M tubes were too short even though they were 24" length and my materials were 24". This was due to the recessed end plugs. I made a bottom for one end of the tube out of 1/16" thick cardboard. This was glued on with Duco Cement. Now the material fit well and one end plug can be used.

I cut down a 36" tube to fit my extra large styrene strips.
	Green masking tape is wrapped around the tube top and the contents marked. Use as many tubes as necessary to store materials so they are easy to access. I had a lot of several sizes of stripwood and each of these got their own tube. The rest was categorized as square or rectangular and put into a separate tube.
After several months of using the tubes, here are a few issues: The glued on bottoms break loose and have to be reglued. So far, this hasn't been a problem, but could be if the contents of the tube were spilled. Having the tubes standing individually quite often means one or more of them is falling over. I bound three together with rubber bands but the rubber bands didn't hold the tubes tight enough so I taped them. The problem is that to dump the contents of one tube, all three have to be lifted and tilted. The writing on the green band is hard to read in low light or shaded areas of the room. Perhaps relabeling with a marker would help.
Styrene Strips

Here are my piles of styrene strips and styrene sheets. I had them thrown loosely in two drawers and I could not find what I needed to build models, so I decided to find a way to bring order to the piles of chaos.
	The first step was to organize all of the various sizes of styrene material.
	I decided to make trays out of foam core board. I cut boards to fit into the drawer and then glued strips on the edges to form a shallow box. They have to be held in place until dry.

Here is how the trays fit into the drawer.
	Two end trays were built to hold shorter pieces. This one is made from .060 styrene, but the rest were made from foam core board.
After several months of using this method, I did find some shortcomings: I have several pieces of Plastruct that are longer than the trays and therefore have to sit on the top. They are always in the way and have to be handled each time I remove a tray. The trays are not deep enough and when I tip them to remove them from the drawer, some of the sheets fall out. The trays are a bit tight for the drawer width. This is because I did not leave enough space between the tray sides and the drawer sides.

Organizing Strip Material

Basswood

Styrene Strips