It's a perenial question. Once you acquire a big enough pile,
how do you have the slightest idea of what you actually have
and how do you go about finding something when you need it?

This is part one of the solution. a 36" wide 12" shelf with
13 shelves full of cardboard bin boxes. I'm going to have to
order two more shelf units to hold everything here.

As usual, first they get sorted by shape and size. 4-pin
balloon, 4-pin ST, loctal, metal, octal, rectifiers and
so forth. Then as the boxes fill up, "Oh, look, I have 25
or so 6SK7 tubes, they get their own box now."

I spent a coupe of days web surfing and the best price I
managed to find was from ULine. $145 for the shelving
unit, and roughly $50-70 per 100 for the bin boxes.

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a hurry to assemble things
this morning and made the mistake of using a cheap Chinese
screw driver instead of a decent rubber cushioned Klein. I
know have several holes in my hand as a result. (blisters)

But it's kind of fun to know where all the tubes are. I was
rather amazed to find a good Arcturus 45 in the pile, thee
good 2A3s and a couple of ST 47s.

Jeff

I used to use open boxes but I found that the tubes (and anything else I
stored that way) got too dusty. I am in the process of converting to closed
boxes. Fortunately, I work in a factory where they use the same parts over
and over so I have a good source of several sizes of identical boxes. That
still leaves the problem of where to put the boxes.

I sort my tubes similarly to the way you do except that I put all of the
same type together regardless of what type envelope they have (unless there
are too many to fit in one box). I also group similar types together, for
example, 50C5 and 50B5 share the same box.

As for finding them, I set up a spreadsheet that shows all the types I have
along with interesting variations (6H6 round top vs. 6H6 flat top). Various
columns show how many I have of each type and the number of the first type
on the label of the box they are in. I also have a column listing if I want
any more of each type. This saves a lot of time when a sale list comes
around.

--
Jim Mueller

To get my real email address, replace wrongname with eportiz. Then replace
nospam with sacbeemail.

"Jeffrey D Angus" wrote in message
...
It's a perenial question. Once you acquire a big enough pile,
how do you have the slightest idea of what you actually have
and how do you go about finding something when you need it?

This is part one of the solution. a 36" wide 12" shelf with
13 shelves full of cardboard bin boxes. I'm going to have to
order two more shelf units to hold everything here.

As usual, first they get sorted by shape and size. 4-pin
balloon, 4-pin ST, loctal, metal, octal, rectifiers and
so forth. Then as the boxes fill up, "Oh, look, I have 25
or so 6SK7 tubes, they get their own box now."

I spent a coupe of days web surfing and the best price I
managed to find was from ULine. $145 for the shelving
unit, and roughly $50-70 per 100 for the bin boxes.

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a hurry to assemble things
this morning and made the mistake of using a cheap Chinese
screw driver instead of a decent rubber cushioned Klein. I
know have several holes in my hand as a result. (blisters)

But it's kind of fun to know where all the tubes are. I was
rather amazed to find a good Arcturus 45 in the pile, thee
good 2A3s and a couple of ST 47s.

Jeff

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a hurry to assemble things
this morning and made the mistake of using a cheap Chinese
screw driver instead of a decent rubber cushioned Klein.

Home Despot often has cordless electric drills/drivers for around $20.

William Sommerwerck wrote:
Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a hurry to assemble things
this morning and made the mistake of using a cheap Chinese
screw driver instead of a decent rubber cushioned Klein.

Home Despot often has cordless electric drills/drivers for around $20.

Every try driving slotted screws with a power drive?

The shelves are assembled with 67 1/4-20 truss head screws.
About 7/16" diameter and almost NO depth to the slot. This
requires a screwdriver blade at least 3/8" wide to properly
tighten.

This basically means "use hand tools". The problem was in
using a screwdriver with an under sized handle diameter
for the torque required and that had almost sharp edges
to the flutes put in the handle for "added grip".

On tool handles: Over the years, for bench work, I've
come to the conclusion that Xcelite has some of the
nicest feeling screwdriver handles. For construction
it's Klein. Sears Craftsman screwdrivers are nice, but
I still prefer the feel of the Xcelite tools. The cheap
black and yellow Stanley "home" tools are only slightly
better than the Chinese palm-eater that got me yesterday.
Although Stanley has the "looks like Klein" cushioned
handles on the good screwdrivers you can buy after you
decided that the money you saved on the cheap ones wasn't
worth it.

Oh, and I did throw the cheap piece of crap screwdriver
in the trash so I don't make the same mistake twice.

Jeff

Every try driving slotted screws with a power drive?

Yes, it works very well... if you keep the driver at the low end of its
speed.

I used to use open boxes but I found that the tubes (and anything else I
stored that way) got too dusty.

A piece of cloth (old bedsheet) spread over the contents of each box
keeps dust off. I've stored my tubes in cardboard bins for years,
sorted by initial number. When I get too many of a number I subdivide
by following letter. There's no need for an inventory list since
there's no question where a tube is.

Alan