Undoubtedly, tool chests are great addition to every people life who always play around a lot of tools. Having a good tool chest will save a lot of your time, and will keep the items inside protected and secured. That being said, to get the best out of a tool chest you need to know how to organize tool chest as well. Otherwise, it won’t benefit you much.
This is where most beginners choke! Since they use tool chest for the first time, they don’t hold much idea about. So if you are beginner and looking for direction, here it is. We have shown the one of the best ways to organize tool chest.
Before we get started we want to mention that there are different ways of organizing a tool chest, it varies person to person. But what we are showing here is a good way and a lot of professionals do follow this to keep things organized.
Let’s begin!
How to Organize Tool Chest
Sort by Types
People have different kind of tools and that is why organizing them becomes necessary. If you have different types of tools, you can sort them by it. For example, if you have wrenches, screwdriver, SAE tools, you can put them into different drawers. Tool chests come with 5 to 8 drawers and half of them are small and some are big. So you would want to choose the big drawers for big tools, and small ones for small tools.
Sort by Size
After sorting by types, if you see there are still space left then you would want to sort the tools by its size. If you have same tools of different sizes, during work picking one size among 10 different sizes becomes time consuming. You can easily pick the largest and the smallest one but sizes like 4,5,6,7,8, these are close sizes, from a distance 4 and 5 size might seem same. So if you have space, you can put different sizes into different drawers.
For making efficient organizing you can do another thing. For example, you can label a drawer as size 6 and put all the same size tool into that drawer. Whether is screwdriver, wrench, SAE, socket, or anything, if the size is same store it there. You will be able to access extremely fast if you organize this way. Having that said, you might more space for this kind of organizing.
Top to Bottom Drawers
We have broken a tool chest into three parts, Top drawer, middle, and bottom drawers. Not all the part drawer size is same, so you have to organize tools according to that. Here is how you should organize.
Top Drawers
These drawers are mostly small drawers, and you would want to store tiny items such as bolts, nuts, small screws, tapes, etc. Some tool chest top drawers come with partitions, means in a drawer there are 6 to 8 small compartments and you can put different items into different compartments. And if somehow the drawer doesn’t come with any compartment, in that case you can make compartment according to you. Cork shits and glue should do the work.
Try your best to fill the top drawers with items they need very often. Screws, nut, bolts, tape, short wires, sockets, etc. You can store small screwdrivers as well.
Middle Drawers
Middle drawers are little bigger than the top drawers. And tools like wrenches, screwdrivers, chisels, and other tools can be organized there. Most of the time middle drawers comes padded, non-slipping pads that keeps the items in place, when you move the tool chest inside items remains still. If your tool chest doesn’t come with these non-slip pads, you can install buy purchasing separately.
Bottom Drawer
In the bottom, we mostly see cabinets in tool chests, so we better say bottom cabinets. These are the biggest in the entire tool chest and the reason why they are always at bottom is because so that can store heavy tools in there. You cannot put heavy tools at the top, even if there is space. Doing so will make the entire tool chest unstable, it can fall down easily when the weight on top is heavy. Storing heavy items in the bottom, makes it stable.
Bottom cabinets are for power tools like portable band saw, jigsaw, drills, heat gun, hand sander, etc. If you want to store any other heavy item apart from these power tools, you can do that. Bottom cabinets come with locking features, so along with power tools, you can store any important items there.
Bungee cords or hook
Some tool chests come with options where you can attach bungee cords and hooks at the side of the tool chest. These are really convenient. For example, if you are installing something or opening anything that requires you to remove a lot of screws, that means you will be needing screwdrivers every time. You cannot keep holding a screwdriver, because there are other things to do.
That’s where bungee cords or hook comes into play. Attach the bungee cord at the side and put the screw driver there. Access it whenever you need. Like that you can put pliers, tape, screwdrivers, scissors, wrench, etc. in the cord on the hook or cord.
Organize in your Own Way
We just shown a basic way how most people organizes there tool chest but that doesn’t mean it will work well for you. So the best would be to organize the tool chest in your way. We mentioned that keep the tiny tools on the top drawer. But most of the top drawers doesn’t come with locking system. If that tiny thing is very important, you cannot just leave it there. In that case, you would want to put it with the heavy tools in the bottom compartment where there is locking system.
So like that, there are a lot things that might not be suitable for you. In that case, use your own brain. Anyways, try organizing, you will learn how to organize a tool chest very soon.
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