KEY TO SUCCESS
Company: Rick’s Sign Company
Project: Self storage
Key to success: You likely have the materials lying around your shop, so don’t purchase ready-made storage units when you can build them yourself.
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A simple shape like this, cut from .040 aluminum by hand or on a CNC machine, can easily be formed to make a base for a shop organizer system for a fraction of what it costs to buy one.
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Around our sign shop for the last 30-plus years, we’ve tried to adhere to what we’ve called the Ten Commandments of a Sign Shop. In this month’s “Shop Talk” we don’t have time to go into each of them, but one may be worth mentioning here: “Don’t dare put something up if you don’t know where ‘up’ is.” Which translated means: If you really don’t know the correct place for a tool or other essential item, don’t create one, as you’ll soon forget where you put it and no one else will ever know.
Staying organized so everyone can find what they need, when they need it, is important in any type of production shop. But, to be able to do even that, there must first be a designated place for everything, and creating practical places for everything in a commercial sign shop is an ongoing process.
This month we’ll look at a few things we’ve made or converted to shop use to help us be more organized and therefore more productive. These are simple things, but oh how important they can be to keep our personnel, and me personally, from wasting time looking for what we need at hand to get our jobs done.
We have two businesses across the highway from each other, and the first item I want to mention was made as a storage system for WPC Services, our sister company. Our powder coating shop there keeps quite an inventory of high-temp silicone plugs to protect threaded holes in all kinds of parts from getting powder baked into the threads. Similarly, we have a variety of small items, primarily sign hardware (bolts, screws, anchors, nuts, washers, rivets, etc.) that we must keep on hand and organized at the sign shop.
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Very inexpensive food storage bins, bought from a large supermarket for much less than $1 each, made perfect bins for our parts storage system. We use the bins for storing high-temp plugs in our powder coating department, and there’ll be others made for all our sign shop hardware items. The price can’t be beat.
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If I pick up an industrial supply catalogue, I am always shocked by the cost of even a simple storage system of plastic bins and some type of trays or racks to hold them with. Hundreds of dollars can be spent on a fairly small system. So, the accompanying photos show one way to make a system that costs only a few dollars to build, but can be used and even expanded to store any amount of the essential small items for any type of shop.
The bins, which cost several dollars apiece from a catalogue, can merely be cheap food storage containers bought at a supermarket like Kroger, or a large discount store. The ones we chose cost $4 for two packages of five containers, or 80 cents each.
The tray to hold 15 bins was simply a sheet of pre-finished .040 aluminum, which we cut on a CNC (waterjet) machine, but could be cut on a router, or even by hand using a hole saw to cut all the radius corners. (The top of the tray could also be cut from plastic or wood, using a hole saw for the radius corners and just making the straight line cuts by hand.)
Our tray was made to be bent to shape on a sheet metal brake after cutting, to form a shallow tray a bit deeper than the bins themselves, and secured on the bottom at the corners with small triangle-shaped gussets. This took just a few minutes to form up this unit, and we will be making more of the exact same for both shops.
Another type of bin or container we have found to be ideal for sign shop use is some sold at Office Depot and perhaps other office supply stores. These are pictured here, and being clear are good for viewing the contents inside when on a shelf. They are also much more economical than any “industrial” storage containers, costing only $1 to $4 each, depending on size.
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Everything cannot be in its place until there is a place for everything. We make very sturdy shelf units out of simple ¾” x 1/8” angle and 1” square tubing, basically building the sides like ladders, and connecting the fronts and backs.
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Did I mention shelves? We also fabricate the most durable shelf systems using ¾" x ¾" x 1/8" angle, and 1" x 1" square tubing, welding the short sides of the shelves up like small ladders, and then connecting with angle cross members. We may add decorative parts at the top, which we have done for both our businesses. The actual shelves are just scraps from when we make 4 x 6 signs from MDO sheets that are of course 4 x 8. One extra step is important; at the bottom of the four leg members we weld a nut just inside the tubing and use small bolts as levelers so our shelves can be leveled to any floor. These shelf systems are strong, can be beautiful, and are durable enough to last forever in the shop.
On a more clerical organizing note, there are a couple of things worth mentioning here, both simple but still important. First, as I have mentioned some time back, we keep up with all our workorders and other papers of importance—whatever they are—by immediately putting the documents into vinyl job folders, which are perfectly designed for our sign shop purposes. The ones we use are from Century Business Solutions and are colored with a clear front, and the front has pockets to fit business cards, or even CDs, made into it. They can be ordered online, and are found under the heading, “project organizers.”
These cost less than $2 each and are worth every cent. We have found that any piece of paper, no matter how important, is simply looking for an escape route if not put into something. These clear-faced folders, with their useful pockets, are just the ticket. We sometimes use them to give customers their drawings, CDs with their files, and with our business card presented on the front.
And one last item, a common sense one, is the venerable erasable marker board, with customized categories and boxes to write in things that need to be ordered, important temporary messages, and so forth. One is shown on page 96, and any version of this type of board is a worthwhile addition to any shop. It just needs to be placed in the handiest location to make the best use of it.
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To keep the individual parts of our constant flow of papers through the shop from crawling off, all of our workorders and most other paperwork go immediately in job folders. They are actually called “project organizers” by Century Business Solutions, the company that makes them and sells them online. |
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Every shop needs an erasable marker placed in the handiest location so it gets used. These can be improved a lot by applying a design that makes scribbled notes better organized. |
Our shop always needs improvement, and it often operates in a state of semi-controlled chaos. Anything we can do to keep us on track, and save the waste of time and other costs of mislaid, lost or forgotten items, is a great benefit to us. If you have ideas that we could use, please share them, and we’ll be happy to share them with your fellow tradesmen right here in “Shop Talk.”
