Parts organizers/storage

[Prune]

I'd like recommendations for electronic parts organizers, including generic ones and specifically for resistors.

 

[dangus]

Look for the 30 drawer all-plastic cabinets (with the small drawers, about 2" wide). Those are a good size for resistors, and at 30 drawers per cabinet it doesn't take very many cabinets to cover the range of 1 ohm to 10 megohms.

The cheapest place I found to buy those was Walmart (made by Integrated Plastics - probably model 10-330).

There's also the 15 drawer cabinets which have the larger size drawer; Walmart had those, cheap, so I got enough to handle a good range of capacitors and other components.

 

[Prune]

I wonder if those tilt bins exist in small sizes. They are more convenient and provide faster access, but they tend to only come in large sizes and there are only a few bins per set.

 

[purplepeople]

Try Home Depot, Home Hardware, Canadian Tire, etc and get the Plano parts trays. They have lids, adjustable sized compartments and you can see through them. They're even easy to pack around if you need to. There are also a number of no-name versions for less.

ensen.

 

[jackinnj]

I use a 3-ring notebook -- I have purchased a lot of polyethylene holders for 6x6 slides (transparencies) and fit the resistors into these pockets -- you can hold several hundred flavors of precision resistors -- 35mm slide holders are a little smaller but will also work. the only problem is that I have to rearrange things when I get a new value which has to fit in between two extant values.

for the resistors which I use a lot of, like 51r, 4k7, 10k, 120r, 100k etc. I use a 3x5 card file -- these are really inexpensive -- i put a card with the resistor value to mark their place and put a plastic bag containing the resistors in the file. you can store thousands of resistors or capacitors this way.

surface mount -- buy a reel on EBay -- the end of production reels of SMT resistors and caps are dirt cheap and can be stored like books.

 

[Stocker]

I have a perfect-for-me solution that you may have available at your local Lowes. It's a little bucket with four almost-clear boxes in it, with a whole buncha dividers, hinged tops. They are from Black & Decker. The ones I am talking about are in a black outer container with an orange handle and the boxes have hinged closures. Home Depot has something similar but the closures on the boxes are fixed and not secure enough to keep 1/8W size and smaller resistors from changing spots with shaking... these have (predicatably from Home Depot) orange outer boxes. IIRC about $10 and worth it. When I went to buy the second one of mine, the guy knew just where they were when I went to ask (different store) because he had one, too!

I have two of these kits and a pair of boxes in one of them is set up for resistors with 40 bins in each box.