Material Storage Solutions

[Jonathan Bowen]

Anyone have any recommendations for storing raw materials? All my stuff is 12" by 16" right now and it fits nicely in a milk crate but its a pain to find stuff in that because I have to leaf through it to find specific colors. I have a rubber made container that works the same way. Both are heavy and just get in the way. Anyone got any other ideas?

[Joe Pelonio]

I have 12"x24" shelves, one for each color of Rowmark, and another (heavier) same for acrylic.
You really want to store flat. Unfortunately I end up with a lot of usable scraps so only the whole sheets are flat on the shelf, the rest on top of them.

[Jonathan Bowen]

I've considered getting or making some 12" by 24" shelves. Most of my raw material comes in that size. I have a jig setup to score and snap those down so it might not need to be that big. I might tear down the ones in my workshop that are nothing but jump or chemical storage and move them into the room with the laser. It would be nice to have something up off the floor so I can grab it easier and keep it organized.

I had briefly considered making some sort of slotted bin to that was big enough to hold a full sheet of several colors and one for assorted acrylic. I really don't have the equipment to do it right so it will be hard to make the slots for the dividers at the correct angle. I was just going to drop some MDF into each slot as a divider.

[Paul hardy]

We've made some dividers to store our Rowmark material flat. Most of what we buy is 12x24, but I just finished a couple of slots to hold 24x48 a few days ago. I just took some 3/16 hardboard for the base and use 1x2 poplar for the walls and just screw them together . The bottom row sits on a solid shelf, so no need to reinforce it. For the upper rows, I have 3 strips of 3/4 plywood about 3in wide in between the rows. We used the Rowmark material to make the tags for each slot so it's a quick way to see what is supposed to be there and what the Rowmark part # is.

So for our 3 row section the order would be:

walls
hardboard
plywood strip
walls
hardboard
plywood strip
walls
hardboard

It was all cut and assembled w/ what was handy at the moment. That happened to be a jig saw and a cordless drill; so nothing fancy is required. So far this has worked our pretty well and is not too expensive. Hardboard here is about $14/sheet which will get you 2 of the bases. On the 1st row we used poplar so was a little higher price. Next rows we had some cut-offs from some big plywood sheets And it works fine too... just need to be little more careful w/ the screws.



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[Ross Moshinsky]

I take the boxes that are supplied by suppliers like JDS and Marco when they ship material and label them with the material color whether they are brass. aluminum, steel, laser, rotary or sublimatable and stack them in a book shelf. I also am able to keep the scraps with the full sheets in the same box
The boxes come in 12x24, 24x24 or 24x48