[sdiy] Organizing Components

[Colin Hinz]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, greg montalbano wrote:

> I've been wrestling with this same issue -
> after 25 years of DIY, I've got on hell of a lot of components -- gave up
> on the plastic drawer thing early on (too many possible categories;  would
> have needed about 600 drawers to hold it all).

For a while I was using hand-made divider trays (first plywood, then
acrylic plastic -- the latter were beautiful though fragile) and
then I was using the plastic drawer cabinets. I then got to the point
where I either had to buy a *lot* more of the cabinets or think of
something else. That's when I discovered a junked type case (!) so
I had a few of the big flat type drawers. These are *really* excellent
for seeing at a glance what you've got readily at hand but the drawback
is that to safely access the parts you need to set the drawer on a
big tidy flat surface -- and while some readers likely have huge
and spacious work areas I know the rest of you will see the problem here.
Plus, one day I managed to drop the "small capacitor" drawer and that
prompted me to rethink the whole approach.

> What I'm currently doing is using the "plastic bag" approach:  a large
> plastic bag of (for example) electrolytics, filled with small ziplocs of
> different values.
> Same thing for resistors, CMOS, opamps, specialized ICs, etc.
> It's not elegant;  but it keeps things in their place, more or less;  and
> whenever I'm in the middle of a project or repair, I only have to look in
> one place.

And that's what I've come up with, at least for the resistors, caps and
transistors. For the trannies I've marked the bags with basic specs so
that if I'm looking for "just any old transistor" that's, say, an NPN
with 200 mA Ic and BVceo of at least 35V, I can quickly grab something
without having to consult any specs.

For ICs, I keep most of them in the high-density black foam, as I lucked
onto a big sheet of the stuff a few years ago. Linear stuff on one sheet,
metal-gate CMOS on another, memories on another, TTL on a whole wack of
sheets (eek!), and so forth. Stuff in quantity I keep in the plastic
tubes but they're scarce these days and I haven't been able to scam
any free ones for nearly a decade, as virtually everything is SMT
these days.

Now if I only had the time to *build* stuff like I used to.....

- Colin Hinz
  Toronto, Canada