Over the weekend I got a call from the wife of a local shop owner who at one time did repairs, he worked well into his late 80's before finally calling it quits and moving everything from his shop to the basement of his home. He did mostly TV and Radio repairs with a big emphasis on Ham radio and vintage receivers.
Over the past few years I've missed his not being there when it came to small parts since he often saved me having to order a bunch of small parts by mail. He kept parts in bulk, and over the years had bought out others who did the same. He passed about 5 years ago or so and since then his wife, who was 20 years his junior, pretty much just locked up the basement and forgot about it.
The reason for her calling was to see if I would be willing to take all his stuff so she could sell the house.
Before I realized what all it was about to entail, I says sure, I'll be right over to take a look. I hopped in my truck and headed over there.
Two hours later I was on the third trip and hooking up my trailer.
90% of it all is small parts, resistors, transistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. plus a few hundred small assortments, plus things he bought in bulk in larger cabinets.
Plus all the shop equipment.
Most of the shop equipment is just older versions of what I already have, so nothing special there, but the having the parts on hand is going to be nice.
The issue is that he really didn't seem to have things very well sorted or organized. There's duplicate assortments throughout the lot of cabinets.
For instance there's 159 60 drawer organizers, with five being full of 1/8 and 1/4w resistors, five full of Mosfets, 12 full of small transistors, plus a ton of 12 and 15 drawer kits of the same. He had them stacked all around his work area, the walls of a 20x30ft area were covered in his basement.
There area also a good many larger cabinets, roughly 4x12" drawers full of various parts as well.
What I'm thinking is to reallocate those larger cabinets to consolidate the smaller assortments?
The way it is now is a haphazard confusing mess, with some organizers having a mix of parts with no meaningful purpose that I can see other than he found and empty drawer and filled it. I'm betting that he had so many duplicate assortments because he couldn't find anything when he needed it.
I'm basically looking for suggestions as to how to sort it all out and maybe make it take up less space. Having assortments with 5 or 10 pieces in each drawer makes no sense if it takes up so much space. What I'm thinking is using the larger drawers to separate similar value components with dividers so for example, if I need a 200Ω resistor, I'd go to the 200-250Ω drawer or similar vs digging through 10 or 20 smaller assortment boxes but then there's different type of resistors here too, carbon film, metal film, ceramic, carbon comp, etc. The ranges are pretty thorough as well.
I would sort caps by type vs value, mostly for space but the electrolytics will take more space then do the ceramic caps etc.
The smaller assortment boxes seem like they'd be better suite for diodes and items that take less space to sort. There just aren't as many diodes as there is resistors, transistors and caps.
Here's a few pics of what I'm dealing with.
