by Jeff Day
The larger your workshop, the more places there are to lose a hammer. The smaller the workshop, the denser the mess that hides it. Whatever the case, the hammer is lost,and you either have to find it or buy a new one.
A few shelves, a couple of toolboxes and a bit of organization may solve the problem. Before you start hanging tools on the wall and tracing around them so you know what goes where, it pays to look at the bigger picture. Small things — such as hammers — need to be organized around big things — such as workbenches
Place Major Power Tools
Whatever is most important to your work should be centrally located in your workshop. If you're a woodworker, it's probably the table saw. If you're building radio-controlled airplanes, it may be your workbench. If you're restoring a classic car, no doubt the car belongs at center stage.
Set up separate workspaces for each of your major tools. Position each so it won't interfere with others, and light each workspace well. Make the workspaces as permanent as possible: the surest way to disorganize a workshop is to clear out a space for the chop saw every time you haul it out from underneath the bench. Sooner or later, the stuff you clear out is going to end up in a box you may never open again.
Arrange Small Tools Around Big Tools
Small tools — screwdrivers, chisels, hammers, files and the like — should encircle the workspace where they get the most use. Saw blades belong near the saw. Router bits go near the router table. Portable power tools belong near the bench. There are a limited number of ways to organize them, but make your choices carefully. Pegboard lets you store everything in plain sight. There's a world of hangers to choose from, ranging from simple hooks to slotted shelves for screwdrivers and bins for small parts.
What to Use for Storage
A pegboard is one ways to organize the hand tools you use at the bench, but it's useless for larger tools such as drills and circular saws. They belong on shelves where you can plop them down and pick them up as needed. Prefab freestanding shelves work well, and in a garage or basement workshop, they can separate the workspace from the surrounding area.
Don't limit yourself to the obvious storage choices. Old bookcases hold tools as well as they once held books. Old kitchen wall cabinets have doors that keep tools in and keep dust out. Wooden shelves hung on brackets screwed to the wall provide storage without claiming floor space. In aworkshop with exposed joists, you can nestle long, narrow objects such as PVC pipe between the joists by attaching strips of wood as supports across the joist opening.
Drawers are best for the things you don't use quite as frequently — cold chisels, tin snips and hole saws, for example. Drawers are also good for storing tools that you want to protect from the daily bump and grind — such as torque wrenches, machinist tools or anything sharp.
Mechanics tool chests give you a wide choice of drawer size — larger ones in the base unit and smaller ones in the upper units. The chests are intended to be used as a set but are sold as separate units, so you only need to buy the unit with the drawers sized to meet your needs.
Old kitchen base cabinets with drawers serve double duty as work stations and tool storage: Put your grinder on top and your sharpening stones in the drawer. If things rattle around too much, organize them in cheap kitchen drawer organizers.
You never know where you'll need wrenches and pliers, so keep them in a portable toolbox. Searching for the right wrench while leaning over a snow blower carburetor can be frustrating, so make it easy on yourself. Store the socket set in the case it came in; keep straight wrenches in a roll-up tool pouch (and toss in a couple of screwdrivers if you have extras).
Hard-to-Store Items
No matter their main purpose, most home workshops must meet the needs of a variety of home improvement and do-it-yourself projects. This role can present special storage problems.
Paint. Store paint on shelves that are one can deep and a little more than one can high. Write what the paint's for in magic marker on each can — "Susie's Room," or "Kitchen Trim" — so you can grab the right can quickly when you need it.
Plumbing and electrical tools. You can dedicate a pegboard to plumbing tools, but given their size and weight, it may be best to store them in a 5-gallon plastic bucket. Toss in the Teflon tape, solder, fitting brush, solvent cement and a few spare fittings, and you can just pick up the bucket and take it to the leaking sink of the moment. Store your electrical tools and supplies in a different color bucket and put both on a shelf where you can get them when you need them.
Nuts and bolts. Store nuts, bolts, washers, eyehooks, hose clamps and their ilk in compartmentalized plastic boxes with see-through lids. You need more than one box, so get a set that slides in and out of a case, as if the boxes were drawers. For faucet washers, compression fittings and other small plumbing parts, use tackle boxes.
Bar and pipe clamps. If you have room to spare, rest one end of each clamp in notches you've cut into a pair of sawhorses. When it comes time for a glue-up, the sawhorses will hold the clamps in place while you work. If you don't have room for sawhorses, make a clamp rack from 2x4s and mount it to the studs in the wall.
A former professional furniture maker, Jeff Day has learned that having two of each tool makes each one twice as hard to find.
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