Parts Storage

Check out Jameco Bug Tray #11800 or #11801 and the cabinet that holds them (Bug Cage) #11332 or #11333.

Coin envelopes.

John

Spray them with paint with added carbon or charcoal. Stick ali tape across them - ugly but works. Line with glued antistatic foam etc.

NT

Hello NT,

Most paint does not adhere to plastic very well.

Regards, Joerg

Some will though. Aquadag adhered to TV plastic cases well enough, though it cant have been the waterbased stuff. Household gloss sticks well enough to many plastics, and has enough body to carry a fair amount of conductive junk. I presume there are also car paints, given that so much plastic is used on them now.

NT

Standard coin envelopes are *not* specified as being anti-static. And envelopes are rather inconvenient for storage of a fair number of parts, and leave labelling and sorting a bit messy for easy readability and access. Worst case comes to worst, one could use standard plastic drawer sets and line every drawer/bin with aluminum foil.

Acheson Electrodag Coatings are *made* to adhere to almost any plastic; resistance runs from 5 ohms to 75K, and are also used for EMI work (Nickel Carbonyl additives for that, i presume).

I knew that! If the parts are especially static sensitive - and most aren't - stuff the plastic antistatic bag that they came in, into the coin envelope.

Labeling? Just write on them with a nice bold Sharpie. I also cut out the Digikey label or whatever and stuff it inside or tape it to the back if it's interesting. And I make notes on the envelope, like the name of the rep that sampled it to me, or measured junction capacitance, anything interesting. A hundred will stack nicely, upright, in a standard cardboard stockroom bin. For surfmount parts, storage density must be 20x that of plastic drawers, and much cheaper and easier to use.

John

I did something similar to that at Microdyne with the 3" * 5" zip lock antistatic bags. I used standard size mailing labels to put the stock number and a full descripton on the from of the bags to organize my "SIT" parts, along with some components that were easly damaged in assembly or reflow. A pair of those 18" deep plasitc stock bins kept almost everything in order, sorted by type and values. It cut my trips to the stockroom by 95% becasue I got the little stuff like SMD resistors and capacitors by the hundred. It cost just shy of $5.00 to process the paperwork for each trip to the stock room, and 100 of most of those items were worth less than $5.00.

Hello Robert,

Easy. Just number them at the top and keep an up to date database. I do it with MS-Works.

Don't forget the tin foil hats ;-)

My lab is all wood. No static problems whatsoever. And I hate plastic.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Robert,

Well, yes, there is some stuff. Flame spray is one of them but it is quite expensive. You just can't use any regular paint.

Regards, Joerg

What sort of components?

For small SMD passives and jellybean SOT23 transistors I use 1-dram sample jars bought off eBay in lots of 100. I write the component value on the lid with a sharpie, and I stick the vendor's part number label on the outside. I then group the sample jars by function and part and put them in drawers (see ).

The large drawer size you see in the bottom three rows on that picture holds exactly 100 1-dram jars upright, ready to read the lids. So I have about 4,000 component values in a couple of sets of drawers. (Hmm, that sounds a little odd).

Larger items, like bigger SMD electrolytics, I put loose in individual drawers.

ESD-sensitive items, I leave on their tapes and cut to lengths to fit in those drawers and also in a few of those tackle boxes as you see on the shelf above the drawers.

I recently dumped practically all my through-hole stuff except for a few things like relays, terminal blocks and LEDs - I sent the lot to a lucky reader of this newsgroup.

Even easier: write everything on the envelope.

John

Hello John,

Yeah, but that makes it tougher when you want to whip up a quick design. I like to have that info right on the network. Only the critical parts are in there, not 0805 resistors and the like.

It's also a bit tough when there are specialty parts that can't be clearly categorized. Like sensors. Now where did I put that little envelope? A database can tell you the location.

Regards, Joerg

That's a good question. :-) I really need to go through my stuff and decide what is stuff I am likely to use and store that at my work bench, what is stuff that I want to keep for sentimental reasons (like old parts I inherited from my grandfather) and probably pack those in some boxes and put them away somewhere, and what is just junk I'll never use.

I had no idea such a thing existed, but there seem to be a lot of them in various sizes on eBay.

I don't have a lot of SMD stuff yet, but I am planning on doing a lot more stuff at home in the future and it will probably be as much SMD as possible, so I've been thinking about what to do with all the parts.

It's hard to find things to organize SMT parts because it is just a big waste of space to put even a hundred 0805 caps in a normal flip top plastic box with compartments that are 1.5" cubes. Jameco had a small parts orginizer case for SMDs with

You should probably flip that bottom shelf over to start reversing the sag. :-)

When I set up coated MDF shelving (which can bow) similar to that, I use welded steel triangle brackets and screw them into the wall with three, large lag screws each at the normal 16" spacing into the wall's

That picture isn't the worst case I've seen. I've seen these used as book shelves and that was a real mess in the center. But that picture makes a case for using lots of support when using MDF shelving.

Jon

Here's a pic or two of my home setup. In the first one, on the right side, you can see the three lag bolts into the welded shelf bracket against the wall. If you look, you will see brackets spaced at 16" centers. (And my rats nest, in the lower almost-left.) That is the somewhat left side of my 8' bench area. In the second, a vise or two, parts shelving, etc., on the right side of the bench area. (Cell phone pics, bad lighting, etc., yes I know.)

Jon

I see a box for a VIC20 computer, and on the sam shelf are some of the manuals, along with a Commodore CN2 cassette deck.

Could you use some kind of mini envelopes in those cubes? Not sure where you'd get 1.5" envelopes, I have a small number around that size but no idea where they came from, part of a job lot probably.

NT