# Material Storage



## Lykle (Jun 21, 2011)

Hi all,

I am working on the content of my workbenches.
And that got me thinking about storage for my materials. The pieces of steel bronze alu etc.
I have a few long things like tubing or solid bar, up to 3 meters long.
The rest is all shorter stuff, like up to 1 meter.
So I was thinking of making a matrix of cells roughly 14 cm square and lay down planks in the cells
I have a lot of planks 14cm wide, go figure.

But that would mean welding about 84 pieces of 14 cm square tubing to each other to make the matrix.
I looked at glueing drainage pipes together to make the matrix but I don't like the look of that. And it got messy in the end.

Any other ideas how to make it? 

I could just take the 14 cm planks, cut risers and screw the long shelves onto the risers, staggering so that I can get to the screws. Not as elegant but at least it is simple.
But I am not satisfied with all of the ideas yet, anybody a better idea?

Lykle


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## bradbyname (Jun 21, 2011)

Personally, I slide the material over the cross beams of my work bench which are spaced around 1 meter apart.

If you wanted to improve upon it you could take a horizontal bar, to the depth of your workbench and add pins to it spaced out evenly so that you can organise them into categories which by the sounds of it is what you are aiming for. this way the lengths are only supported in 1 meter intervals oppose to all of the way along the length for instance.

Furthermore, be careful if you are planning on front loading your workbench as i can see alot of chips getting into the plank design  will collect dust well too.

Not sure if i am making sense there or not. been a long day!


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## 1Kenny (Jun 21, 2011)

I used cheep PVC pipe and used drywall screws to screw the PVC to the bottom of a bench. Long PVC for longer pieces and a few short ones for cut pieces.


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## portlandron (Jun 21, 2011)

If you don't like the look of the round PVC pipe what about the square PVC they have for gutter down spouts.


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## Blue_Rock (Jun 22, 2011)

Hi, I've been working at optimising my metal (and wood) storage for years now and I am almost happy with my setup. 

Smaller pieces go in 300mm x 400mm plastic bins stored under bench and on shelving.






Medium lengths go in square down pipe under bench.





Longer lengths are stored on tubular shelving about 2 metres long, the bars are spaced about 600mm apart.





Really long lengths go up on the trusses in my garage.

Small round stock goes under lathe in round PVC tube.





I generally prefer the square downpipe because it makes better use of the space. However, the round PVC comes in a lot of different sizes and is good if you want to store smaller quantities of stock and keep the different sizes/materials separated.


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## dwentz (Jun 22, 2011)

I have been cleaning a rearranging the shop here also. Material storage is my next adventure.
Currently I store the smaller under 1 foot lengths in a open lateral file cabinet, and I have been happy with that for stuff under 1 foot. For the longer pieces. I have a set of 24x48 inch shelfs with some PVC, and cardboard tubes, it it works out OK, but not as well as I would like. I think what I have decided on is to cut some OSB to fit on the shelfs, and screw 4 1x6's to it. These can be stacked on top of each other. The openings being on the 24 inch side. This is probably the most inexpensive and fastest solution that i have come up with, should give me about 12-16 cubbies per shelf to sort things in that are 4 foot long. Where I have my storage shelfs now I have access to the front and 1 side, so I could make some of them open to the front (48 Inch side) for smaller 2 foot lengths.


So I would have something that looks like this.

---------
| | | |
---------
| | | |
---------

--------- = OSB/Plywood

| = 1x6

I also color code my material if I know what it is, I keep a set of paint markers handy for this. Seems I always cut the side that I mark off for some reason, and always have to re-mark it.


Dale


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