Hi there - we have piles and piles of ~1 meter long chunks of heat shrink tubing, of all sorts of sizes and shapes and colors. Right now it's all thrown in a cabinet and is a complete mess.
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You might have to make a decision: do you want them sorted by size, or by color? Then, once you've decided, then you can go to either colors within a size group or sizes within a color group. I've even seen bins of heat-shrink where each color was a different size. (Or each size was a different color, I'm not sure how they catalogued them.)
As far as storage, get a box with multiple chambers, like an egg- crate separator or so, and just stack them up. Or you could save a bunch of paper towel tubes and tape them together to hold your bundles of tubing.
Mailing tubes, cut to various lengths. I prefer six inch intervals. Anything between tube lengths goes in the next shorter length. Look in the short tubes first, and work your way up so you don't have dozens of short pieces of the same type and color. Its worked ell for me, for over a decade.
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Well, the big supply goes in the closet and you shut the door. A small supply lives next to the soldering station, tucked into a tasteful tall vase (well, actually mine is in a lab-surplus graduated cylinder...). A second small supply lives in a ziploc bag in the tool box.
When a vase-resident stem gets too short, that piece is retired to the ziploc bag.
A row of nails along a shelf edge, or other convenient woodwork, with bundles of the tubing suspended from them by loops of elastic bands. Easy to reach out and grab what you want.
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There are not only different colors of shrink tubing, there are different types as well.
There are types that have heat activated adhesives inside, and there are dual layer High Voltage types... the list goes on.
If you are sure that they are all of the same type, you need not pre-classify them by type. Size is all you need. Even with the different colors for a given size in the same "bin", you will find that choosing the right piece needed based on size is easy, and choosing the right color is a decision you make before you even approach the lot.
If they are, however, of different types as well, the problem magnifies, because without them having been marked as to type, it will not be easy for someone not using them constantly to tell one type from another, unless you are a person that pays attention to such details all the time.
Hi John - though a valid suggestion - After the ovening, I would still be left with the problem of having lots of long tubing to organize - so I think the problem at topic would still persist.
Heat the tubing first. The storage room needed will be a lot less.
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If you really did this, the heat-shrink would already be shrunk, and so it wouldn't be any use as heat-shrink again. Albeit, hot heatshrink is pretty limp and plastic, so could conceivably be used in lieu of spaghetti tubing, but I believe that John has merely been having a bit of fun with us here. :-)
I think it was a serious suggestion. There was nothing in the requirements about having to use it for anything.. just storage.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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