Me: You know, I think I have that obsessive/compulsive thing going about a place for everything and everything in its place.
Everybody else: We have seen your shop, and you definitely do not.
Me: Right...
But, I still like to have things organized. While my wounded hand has been healing, I've been entertaining myself by thinking about reorganizing the shop at Grant Street, and doing a bit of online browsing of tools sites and Amazon. I decided I wanted to consolidate all my working-on-cars tools in one place. They were actually well organized in three different chests, but I wanted more. After a good bit of searching and reading of reviews I decided on a new tool cabinet from Harbor Freight (link).
In conversations with Phil Oles and Bruse Schreiner of Make717, we cooked up a scheme. I had a great coupon that offered the lowest price I had seen for that cabinet, and would allow multiples to be bought. We decided to do some quick fund-raising, and get one for the Make717 Innovation Center at the same time I was buying mine. Of course, I still had to pay for the one for Grant Street, but we quickly raised the funds for a second, and I went to Harbor Freight and bought two. As you can see, two of them completely filled the 8-foot bed of my pickup:
Today, we got some help to unload them at the Innovation Center, and we unboxed them. Then, we loaded mine back up, and Bruce, Phil and I unloaded it at Grant Street, with the help of a hydraulic lift table. It weighs 245 pounds! Special thanks to those two guys for helping me safely unload that beast.
This is a heavy duty cabinet, of impressively thick steel, with good full-extension slides on the 13 drawers. The only weakness in the whole cabinet is the drawer liners, which are too light and flexible. I should add, however, that most toolchest vendors don't even include liners, so props to HF for doing so. I got some 1/8" thick hardboard, and cut pieces to size for each drawer, making enough for both my cabinet and the one at Make717. Then I used Loctite spray glue on my set to adhere the liners to that backer, making them stiff enough to avoid sliding or bunching. Phil is going to do the same for the Make717 set.
The idea is to spray a thin coat on both hardboard and liner, and wait one minute. I sprayed the glue on the smooth size of the hardboard for better adhesion. Two tips: Wear a long-sleeved shirt while spraying (otherwise the overspray gets glue all in the hair on your arms), and set up a separate area to spray so you don't get the work surface sticky, just the parts.
After that minute, stick the two pieces together. Thank goodness you can pull it apart and try again if it's not straight the first time! I had to do that on nearly every piece. I then used a J-roller to make sure the bond was secure. I used two hands for pressure - I had to use one of them to take the picture.
Once all that was done, I popped them in place and started organizing. While I had been haunting the Internet tool sites, I also bought some fixtures specifically made to organize pliers, wrenches and screwdrivers. I already had similar ones for my sockets, so I was ready to really lay things out. They say you should have pictures of your tools in case you have to replace them, so here's the result:
The wide top drawer was perfect for my large collection of pliers and cutters. Isn't that standing pliers organizer cool (link):
Next down was various drivers and screwdrivers, including some hex and Torx drivers. Here's the link for the screwdriver tray. You can see that each row of drawers after the top drawer has one wide and one narrow drawer:
Wrenches, following the metric to the left, SAE to the right scheme. I used two of the wrench organizers (link), since I had two sets of each size in both metric and SAE.
More metric wrenches, and electronic stuff:
Torque wrenches and various specialty tools, including a metric socket set that allows bolts to pass through the wrench. I used that when changing the rear shocks on the Z3 Coupe:
I still have three drawers left to fill! I'm sure that won't take long....
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