Storing your Amateur stuff ... everywhere.

Foundations of Amateur Radio

There is so much stuff associated with Amateur Radio that your family might be forgiven in thinking that your hobby is all about being in the middle of a junk-yard surrounded by the carcasses of disassembled gear, components, failed projects, obsolete equipment and scraps of wire, solder and countless screws, resistors and other bits and pieces that are just too valuable to dispose of.

During the week I was given an incentive to reorganise my work-shop. I set aside an hour to do it and unsurprisingly, armed with 20/20 hind-sight, it took a day to complete. The upshot of this activity is that I can now walk into my work-shop, something which I couldn't last week, and to top it off, I could actually find things.

I confess that I've reorganised my work-shop several times over the years, but each time I find that it returns to its natural state of junk everywhere. I have noticed that this state is taking longer and longer to achieve, which means that I am improving things, but not quite as well as I would like.

The biggest improvement I found last time around was to install shelving. I also used cardboard boxes to put stuff into, but that turned out to be a mixed blessing, tidy, but unusable, since I had to keep stacking and un-stacking boxes to see what was inside and writing on the outside only helped if the list of what was in the box was complete, which I'm sure you know, is never ever the case.

This week I made an incremental change. I have purchased a whole slew of transparent plastic boxes, about the size of a shoe box each, with lid, stackable and big enough for most of the things I need to store.

I've arranged the boxes along several shelves, stacked two high, so you only ever have to lift one box if you need to get to the bottom one.

When ever I go into a bottom box, I move it to the top, so over time the most used boxes will be on top and the ones I don't use often will be on the bottom.

Now I have a box with Velcro straps, one with cable ties, one with electrical tape, one with self-tapping screws, one with audio connectors and so-on.

Time will tell if this helps.

You might recall in the past that I've also got a stack of fishing boxes. Not a whole tackle box, just a single layer box with square compartments, removable dividers, just large enough for about 4 PL259 connectors in each. They're also transparent and stackable.

Each compartment has some unique component. Red Anderson Power-Pole shells in one, Black in the next, Green, Purple, Yellow etc, each in their own little space. The connector innards are in another compartment, the joiners in another, BNC male connectors in another, and so-on.

I've seen similar attempts at organisation using glass jam jars, but in my experience they don't stack well, are never uniform, unless you have 100 identical jars and are not compatible with concrete floors and gravity.

I'm sure that I've missed some salient storage advice, so feel free to drop me a line and share your experiences.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB