**The Maker's Workshop: A Journey of Organization and Improvisation**

As I sit here amidst my workshop, surrounded by wires, components, and various gadgets, I am reminded that even the most well-organized spaces can become chaotic over time. In this article, I will take you on a journey through my own workshop, where we'll explore the process of reorganizing a cluttered space, and the creative solutions that come with it.

**The Switch Box Conundrum**

I began by tackling the switch box in one corner of my workshop. It was a tangled mess of wires and switches, with no clear indication of what each button or potentiometer did. I needed to make sense of this chaos and find a way to organize it all. After some experimentation, I decided to rewire the entire system, switching out the push buttons for custom-made ones and installing new pots and resistors. The result was a much more streamlined and efficient switch box.

**The Electronics Drawer**

Next, I turned my attention to the electronics drawer. This was a graveyard of components that had been relegated to the back of the drawer due to lack of use or unclear usage. I decided to sort everything out once and for all, separating the various types of capacitors, resistors, and other components into different drawers. It was a daunting task, but with some patience and elbow grease, I managed to get everything sorted and labeled.

**Cable Routing: The Never-Ending Battle**

One of the most frustrating aspects of working in a cluttered workshop is dealing with tangled cables. To combat this, I invested in a few different types of cable routing solutions, including cable ties, zip ties, and heat shrink tubing. These tools have become essential to my workflow, allowing me to keep my cables organized and tidy.

**The Power Supply: A Game-Changer**

One of the most recent additions to my workshop is a new power supply for my workbench. This simple upgrade has made a huge difference in my workflow, allowing me to power all of my tools without having to constantly unplug and replug them. I've also found that keeping the power supply underneath the bench is incredibly convenient, saving me time and effort every day.

**The Loft: A Treasure Trove of Parts**

Up in the loft, I have a collection of miscellaneous parts and components that are waiting to be used. These include custom-made switch boxes, project boxes, and various types of capacitors and resistors. It's amazing how often these hidden treasures can come in handy when working on a new project.

**The Process: Embracing Chaos and Imperfection**

Reorganizing my workshop was not just about tidying up the physical space; it was also about embracing the process itself. I realized that even in the midst of chaos, there is beauty to be found. The mistakes, screw-ups, and imperfections are all part of the journey, and by accepting them as such, I can focus on finding creative solutions rather than getting bogged down by frustration.

**Demerit Badges: Celebrating the Mistakes We Make**

As makers, we're often encouraged to strive for perfection, but I believe that embracing our mistakes is an essential part of the learning process. In my workshop, I've created a collection of "demerit badges" – small reminders of the screw-ups and mishaps that happen when working on projects. These badges serve as a humorous reminder that even in the midst of chaos, we can find lessons to be learned.

**The Result: A Workshop that's Truly My Own**

After several hours of work, my workshop is now a true reflection of my personality and workflow. The switch box is tidy and organized, the electronics drawer is sorted and labeled, and the cable routing is efficient and well-managed. It's not perfect – there are still areas where I need to improve – but it's mine, and I'm proud of it.

As I wrap up this article, I want to leave you with a message: even in the midst of chaos, there is beauty to be found. By embracing our mistakes and imperfections, we can focus on finding creative solutions rather than getting bogged down by frustration. And who knows? You might just find that your own workshop – or project – is waiting for you around the corner, just over the horizon of a well-organized space.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody adam savage in my cave with a um well it's a holiday it's memorial day today uh nobody's i got no meetings i got no deeds to do no promises to keep i'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep um and i have been working on my r2d2 i've been working on the electronics of my r2d2 head recently i just redid the data displays and i'm getting ready in my head look at this i'm not even wearing a black shirt this is such a weekend getup for me at any rate i've been working on r2d2's electronics and as part of that i have um i've had to come to an admission which is that i can no longer control i no longer have any control over my electronics in this space and i need some control what do i mean by a lack of control okay so let's see the first place i have electronics the first place i have electronics is here i have five six six sword emo cases full of electronics and there's doubles in here there's switches in like three of them and i've renumbered some of these and reorganized them these need a little attention then there's the standalone electronics cart which hasn't gotten any love since i built it and it needs it needs some love because it doesn't really work i think i need to rebuild the top from scratch based on what i really need to be first order retrievable because it's gotten way beyond its charge and then in these drawers here solder and test leads and line batteries and switches and it switches another bin of switches what about all those switches over there well there's so many they had to move over here this is a problem when you have things in multiple locations oh what's going on with this hole what's going on with this hole is that that drawer got so full that that's literally where i've been storing it for weeks weeks weeks this is the kind of thing that happens in a shop even one like mine where you know i seem to spend so much time organizing we're not even done yet with how many different locations electronics exists in because over here i've got project boxes and wall warts sculpey that's something different el wire led strip and battery holders my issue with electronics and i think the reason that it's taken me this long to realize that i am helpless is that i i know just enough about electronics to be dangerous um i don't know i i have yet to program my own raspberry pi or or similar arduino type board i need help to do things like that um i can you know open something up and figure out why it's broken sometimes and scrape its traces and troubleshoot it but uh mine is a very uh feral kind of electronics knowledge i can make a zoo i can make a usable wiring diagram and i can follow it and get things to work but the other thing that happens is when i'm looking for the right thing for a project like recently for the amp button that i made for the matrix i end up buying like well let me try these let me try two of these switches and see if these work oh no they're not quite it let me try two of these well they're not quite it and then they end up with like six switches that are close but not exactly what i needed um and for r2 i was looking for well when working on r2 in the main head i have two three four five six switches and they all have different needs they're all double pull double throws except for one which is a triple throw double pole etcetera like i ended up having to pull out every drawer from every section and looking at them all in order to kind of wrap my head around what switches i had and that's when i realized you've got to deal with this problem so good news for my tested compadres is i think there's some electronics that are going to become available because i've got too many of things um and the good news for me is it's memorial day there's not a single damn meeting on the whole roster today so i am here and you know until the end of the day and i this isn't i'll talk about this build during it sometimes but like this is going to be i'm setting up a high angle and you get to watch like the whole breakdown because it is a bit of a breakdown i have to sort of destroy this whole system in order to understand it so i'm going to start by clearing some workbenches a bit um i'm going to bring down some of my i have a bin full of extra sortimo sorters so that i can shift things as needed yeah it's a whole thing it's like i gotta wrap my head around all these different categories like sure there's this whole wonderful reality where there's lithium ion batteries like this that are chargeable and you can usb with them but i need a single location where all those live with all their chargers and well should the plugs that go into those the barrel plugs should those all live with that they probably should and then there's the solder and the silver solder and then there's the led light bulbs the incandescent light bulbs there's the lit switches the non-switches the latching the non-latching the momentary yes i have also thought about doing a why am i spinning around it's like we're dancing um i have also thought about uh doing an introduction to switches my issue is that i feel like such not an expert in electronics that i'm always a little reticent but i may by the time we're done here uh line up a bunch of switches and talk to you guys about the switches that i use maybe we can pop that out as a standalone yeah i even have another one-day build i'm hoping to finish today we will see my estimation is that the sorting of the electronics which is going to involve some extensive foam core drawer separator use and uh re-sorting of the resorting probably about a five-hour gig so yeah i should be done by mid-afternoon we will see all right let's get a vantage point on this puppy what's one you haven't seen what about here huh there's nothing to really latch on to up there is there wait a second we should have power i screwed up i was supposed to be recording for all this i'm really sorry i've walked you through all the areas so i've cleared out almost all of these drawers and adjusted them there's switch overflow i'm going to walk you through all these sections once i have them all done wow so many pieces and parts but the trick is to delineate what i need more than other things so for instance i've got all these pre-wired leds and sockets those all go here because i need them very regularly whereas the less needed stuff like lithium-ion batteries which are more like at the end of the project those can go in here which is over here and then the deeper storage like all the wall warts over here can go over there i haven't even yet started to pull out that crap i've been going for about three hours already yeah so many little things okay oh whoops all right there's so much garbage there is so much garbage um what do these do these are freaking awesome let's see here they look like 12 volts well let's just find out eh yeah why not all right all right so i've managed to tame these five electronic sortimos my very the one that gets the most used is this one with my twist wire lugs my heat shrink wire and my heat shrink can lug connectors then i've got my crimp lugs and some methods for joining wires and doing uh some small bus bars then i've got and you can see i have some room here and i have some room here and i even have a little room here this is electronics and cable routing then we have switches where this is all toggle switches and toggle switch parts and this is all push buttons and pots potentiometers like this thing and panel lights push buttons pots and panel lights yeah so those five plus i've got the five drawers for my electronics food cart going this is arduino open projects clip leads and fairy lights xlr and sound i got fuses i got voltage transformers i got bus bars and connectors and barrel connectors and lugs yes here i've got hold on this one battery holders of every kind this has been in way too deep storage for too long so now what i need to do is go in here and remove this move whatever lighting is let remove whatever writing is there and then i need to actually put these back so i have some room i also have a miscellaneous electronics drawer so when like my friend zach is here and he's like i don't know do you have a blah blah and i'm like i might have it why don't we check this drawer and he'll be like yeah you've got what i need that's how this works here i don't know many times what a thing is but i keep it and i keep it in a place i can find it so um that has dealt with the sortamo rack over there the one you can see is empty and the food the the airplane food cart over here which you can see now is empty that top drawer for all the solder and soldering stuff is good it's good i don't need to adjust it right now but i cannot put these back until i've labeled them so that's the next part oh i forgot i've also got all of this switch overflow here look at this beautiful thing i've got my lit led toggles here single pole single throw i've got a bunch of cheap single pole single throw toggles here i've got some more expensive double pole double throw triple throw etc i've got some toggle protectors here i've got some momentaries yeah got a little bit of everything so yeah it's time to switches that's actually not bad but i'm gonna adjust that oh yeah acetone gets rid of whiteout maybe you didn't know that but now you do all right i think we can start labeling and i feel like this one might look fast yes yes that should be the front of that right because yeah yeah okay so this is switches i feel like i want to do this on the other side wow that is terrible all right come on let's see if i can get this a little bit no i kind of want to be up like this maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe one of the difficulties with a shop like mine is that i'm a generalist and which means i'm constantly shifting the kind of project that i'm working on wow um i'm constantly changing the kind of project that i'm working on uh and that means when i stock things i can't just i sort of have to have a storage system where i can see everything because there's so many different categories it's easy to lose track there are so many categories it's easy to lose track and frankly for electronics i had to kind of wrap my head around exactly i'd spend several months thinking about how i work on electronics and what i like to work with and the way i think about electronics in order to figure out how i wanted to store these and there's always a hierarchical system of like easy to get to versus slightly more difficult to get to that's one then there's how you label it and you know what i've been finding is a good portion of the time the what i write here in white is a little hard to see from a dozen feet away so i'm going to do all my labeling on black tape and apply it here and that makes it very reconfigurable later when i want to reconfigure it i'm going to go on the right side toggles okay the first one i can apply thanks i want to talk about graphics here for a second you might not think of yourself as a graphic designer which is fine that's a very specific trade but even in the arrangement of your own shop graphic the rules of graphic design hold and should be held too and by that i mean when you are showing a list of things in graphic design you don't want that if it's six things that are all in the same category you don't want six different fonts unless they're radically different categories you want to make that bulleted list a bulleted list right it means that everything's indented the same so you know that this is under that heading and the same thing goes for labeling drawers i put this sticker in i put this sorry i put this um piece of tape in with the label and i accidentally centered it and then when i put it here next to this one like my brain was like they're not the same thing they need to be if you're gonna do something follow it along each drawer and it just makes it a little easier and a little faster for your eye to see it yeah and that's graphic design that's communication and good design good design communicates the whole thing to you as quickly as possible unless that's not the point of the design however for the most part since graphic design is a communication medium you want everything that you lay out graphically to communicate to you what that graphic is about as fast as possible you want to make it easy for the eyes to categorize and park things when they're done thinking about them yeah so when you're labeling drawers go ahead and get consistent get bright get high contrast and get figure out your consistency and i swear it'll make it easier for you to see the things that are in all your little compartments yeah all right we're going to keep on going here this is battery holders all right the first hard part is done and my secondary electronic supply shelf uh this part is good this is taking longer than i thought it would or four hours in um now now i have the sword emotes are mostly done but now we've got the um where is it there it is yeah now we've got this storage here these wooden boxes so i've got to get these guys going these are tricky oh we're going to have to really really see this stuff out here what color what color that's the real trick here you got to figure out what color every damn thing is chip on board 12 volt lumens waterproof input no color all right all right this is some lovely cob let's try it out warm white hey that's nobody fiber optics those can go somewhere else ultraviolet warm white that's white that is a wall water oh my god what the hell are these these are other buzz bars christ good lord oh good price all right addressable mofos those are addressable rgbs these are cob headlamps oh i've got even more oh okay it's a ring light what is in there so that's all fiber optics led strip and fiber optics these cob ring lights those could be separate however this chisel can get into a bit of a what the hell what is all this stuff all right there's a lot going on here let's start walking through it okay of the three electronics areas we'll start with the hi there's some lighting hi that's my fluke multimeter saying you've left me on too long i'm shutting myself down thanks for letting me know uh okay so in your shop you are always gonna have multiple levels of access to things and well sorry you might have all sorts of different ways of organizing your stuff but for me personally like for something like electronics or screws or sanding stuff there's the version of it that i use every day there's a version of it i use every month and this version of it i use every year so the deep stuff is the stuff i use once a year the medium stuff is the stuff i use once every month and the best the most accessible is going to be what i can what i need every every week every day so in the deepest yearly storage i've got up there well you see i've got sculpey and modeling stuff then i've got project boxes motors and controllers they come up very rarely then there's these wall warts oh yes you never one never throws out a wall wart whenever one never throws out a wall wart i keep them all they all end up being useful at some point so wall warts power supplies that goes up there um let's get that going that's deep storage so i'm going to put that off to the left it's heavy oh no i can put it way up top great beauty all right moving on moving moving on from there moving on from there i've got some lock line and some other lock line medium sized lock line and then i've got 12 volt car hardware i have more of this in a couple of other places in storage that i've got to locate but like this comes up from time to time and it's good to have it in a specific location um this is fairly fairly esoteric stuff uh but next to it is all sorts of led lighting now here i've got some like custom led units i've got some chip on board headlamps ring lights beacons smaller ring lights i've got el wire i've got mr16s and like household lighting yeah i put handles on these so that they were easy to pull out that actually really makes a difference in whether or not you actually use something oh there we go over here then we can put the custom led stuff right next to it this is definitely more accessible and then last and definitely not least i've got the led strip lights of the multiple colors and i've got my fiber optics i know fiber optics is pretty esoteric but for me i actually dig it this this this this is random electronics i'm gonna label that random electronics and it's gonna go up right here and the cutters the cast casters are going to go upstairs those go upstairs oh great all right that's once a year storage now we've got once uh once a week storage want some yeah once a month storage give or take uh so down here we've got some raspberry pi arduino stuff some breadboard maker kits and some beads and oh oh blinky lights wait a minute those well those can look bad we've got other things like toggle switch and micro switch overflow here they're all in one location so now switches are only in three bins instead of five bins uh here we've got bus bars barrel connectors other connectors other connectors you're always i still have yet to find my perfect solution for like an eight lead connector from one thing to another there is a there are as many systems as there are people and everyone has their favorite battery holders this one now this one's been bouncing around like a stepchild for the longest time it hasn't been getting the respect it's due and now it's here and lives here that's probably maybe one of the bigger innovations of like my electronics brains that goes here um here we've got some uh 12-volt step-down transformers adjustable and otherwise we've got some xlr and audio stuff some voltage panel meters lithium-ion batteries and their chargers and then way up top here it's all solder flux and such so that's the medium storage and i'm really happy with that don't get me wrong there are still some things left by the wayside and then it's always like posing a muppet then it comes to the sortimo sword mode part of them um so this is the sword of mose is the stuff i use on a much more regular basis and now it is really usable to me this is great we've got the pre-wired 12-volt leds all in their colors we've got the incandescents the grain of wheats the auto bulbs the other auto bulbs the other auto bulbs some super secret ones incandescents leds the plugs and the seats oh this is great uh this is 31 and this goes here right above set screws yeah okay then the toggle switches that were there under the the every week these are the much more regularly necessary toggle switches so i've got the rockers and i've got the lit rockers and i've got that oh these little nuts let me tell you when you buy cheap switches from uh from places around the world this is usually the part that is the that looks metal but is like some kind of barely metal uh i've got lots of different toggles and pull switches oh i'm so happy this is number 30 this goes right above the lights then 29 i kind of want to switch those out but i don't have to see about that firing then we've got our lugs and the crimpers plus flashers plus uh uh what do you call it multimeter leads multimeter clip leads of every stripe that's 29. another switchbox now i know this should go next to the other switch box but reordering the numbers of my system is a little more tricky so here is the other switchbox this is all push buttons some custom weird ones and pots potentiometers of many different stripes that's great now when i really need a switch that's where i go i don't have to wonder which place i should be looking this is all my electronics like capacitors farads and excuse me resistors and stuff plus little variable resistors what are those transistors i've got some fans in there and cable routing all my cable routing all those little ways for dressing your cable around the inside of the construction and then the one that gets the most use of any electronics case is this with the heat shrink and now i've servicing it with my favorite heat shrink and i can that's there may still be some adjustment here um but the wire wire nuts my favorites these guys uh plus heat shrink plus some uh solder lugs this is great that's the one i go to every single day and now three four five six six six different sort of modes for my electronics seven different drawers one two three four five six seven yep seven different drawers over there and five drawers over there what is that all total 18 some odd separate drawers for all sorts of things and i still don't know where to put these project boxes if anybody has a need for a gigantic capacitor set i've got two of these i'm not even sure i remember what the shoot was for those um three wire a three three wire um this is the way a lot of people get power into the head of their r2d2 unit with the uh uh uh what the frack do you call these things a slip ring for a wind turbine yes there are a few more things i might like to do with electronic sorting but i have cracked its back i no longer have that random pile of lighting sitting over back there by the sanders that i've been avoiding for literally months and that feels good um but it's memorial day and i've been going at this for five hours and i think you just want to go home and watch watch a movie which is what i'm gonna do thank you guys for joining me for this little bit of shop infrastructure i'm sorry that it was so poorly shot i apologize for that um these are the kind of the lighting there we go hi these are the kind of shoots where i'm just never sure how it's going to turn out so i it's hard for me to talk while i'm doing it because i can't think of its structure and also be thinking of the problem that i'm solving that happens sometimes i did add one more thing to my workbench which is those blue power supplies which you always see me using i've now stuck one underneath my workbench and um boy it is really useful there i need to make a thing for hanging the cords but i use it so often at the bench instead of pulling it out it literally now lives underneath the bench and i mean i guess i could just pull these leads out and turn it off and leave it off most of the time and that makes sense um the extra sortable boxes and project boxes those go back up into the loft and i'll sweep all that up tomorrow morning because yeah it's time to go to be clear i have known that i needed to reorganize all 18 of these bins for the better part of a year and a half sometimes it takes us this long to get to our projects to get to the things i had to really really really wrap my head around what wasn't working in order to figure out what would work that is it's a process man it's a process and you just got to give yourself over to the fact that it's a process it's going to be messy oh that's where that thing went all right i'll see you guys next time bye one of the things i love about this channel is that we don't make how-to videos so much as we make what happened videos and what almost always happens are mistakes and screw-ups in fact they're completely integral to making and honestly to being a person and to celebrate this tested has a new batch of demerit badges for the screw-ups you will encounter in the shop from left to right we have touching your paint job assembling things backwards losing a tiny screw or part gluing your fingers together and smashing your thumb and frankly if you haven't done both of these even if you're not a maker i just don't feel like you've experienced enough of the world i'm not saying get out a hammer and smash your thumb but i will tell you that the blacker your fingernail after the injury the less it's going to hurt in the long run i almost forgot these make excellent additions to your shop apron and they are available at tested dash store dot comhey everybody adam savage in my cave with a um well it's a holiday it's memorial day today uh nobody's i got no meetings i got no deeds to do no promises to keep i'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep um and i have been working on my r2d2 i've been working on the electronics of my r2d2 head recently i just redid the data displays and i'm getting ready in my head look at this i'm not even wearing a black shirt this is such a weekend getup for me at any rate i've been working on r2d2's electronics and as part of that i have um i've had to come to an admission which is that i can no longer control i no longer have any control over my electronics in this space and i need some control what do i mean by a lack of control okay so let's see the first place i have electronics the first place i have electronics is here i have five six six sword emo cases full of electronics and there's doubles in here there's switches in like three of them and i've renumbered some of these and reorganized them these need a little attention then there's the standalone electronics cart which hasn't gotten any love since i built it and it needs it needs some love because it doesn't really work i think i need to rebuild the top from scratch based on what i really need to be first order retrievable because it's gotten way beyond its charge and then in these drawers here solder and test leads and line batteries and switches and it switches another bin of switches what about all those switches over there well there's so many they had to move over here this is a problem when you have things in multiple locations oh what's going on with this hole what's going on with this hole is that that drawer got so full that that's literally where i've been storing it for weeks weeks weeks this is the kind of thing that happens in a shop even one like mine where you know i seem to spend so much time organizing we're not even done yet with how many different locations electronics exists in because over here i've got project boxes and wall warts sculpey that's something different el wire led strip and battery holders my issue with electronics and i think the reason that it's taken me this long to realize that i am helpless is that i i know just enough about electronics to be dangerous um i don't know i i have yet to program my own raspberry pi or or similar arduino type board i need help to do things like that um i can you know open something up and figure out why it's broken sometimes and scrape its traces and troubleshoot it but uh mine is a very uh feral kind of electronics knowledge i can make a zoo i can make a usable wiring diagram and i can follow it and get things to work but the other thing that happens is when i'm looking for the right thing for a project like recently for the amp button that i made for the matrix i end up buying like well let me try these let me try two of these switches and see if these work oh no they're not quite it let me try two of these well they're not quite it and then they end up with like six switches that are close but not exactly what i needed um and for r2 i was looking for well when working on r2 in the main head i have two three four five six switches and they all have different needs they're all double pull double throws except for one which is a triple throw double pole etcetera like i ended up having to pull out every drawer from every section and looking at them all in order to kind of wrap my head around what switches i had and that's when i realized you've got to deal with this problem so good news for my tested compadres is i think there's some electronics that are going to become available because i've got too many of things um and the good news for me is it's memorial day there's not a single damn meeting on the whole roster today so i am here and you know until the end of the day and i this isn't i'll talk about this build during it sometimes but like this is going to be i'm setting up a high angle and you get to watch like the whole breakdown because it is a bit of a breakdown i have to sort of destroy this whole system in order to understand it so i'm going to start by clearing some workbenches a bit um i'm going to bring down some of my i have a bin full of extra sortimo sorters so that i can shift things as needed yeah it's a whole thing it's like i gotta wrap my head around all these different categories like sure there's this whole wonderful reality where there's lithium ion batteries like this that are chargeable and you can usb with them but i need a single location where all those live with all their chargers and well should the plugs that go into those the barrel plugs should those all live with that they probably should and then there's the solder and the silver solder and then there's the led light bulbs the incandescent light bulbs there's the lit switches the non-switches the latching the non-latching the momentary yes i have also thought about doing a why am i spinning around it's like we're dancing um i have also thought about uh doing an introduction to switches my issue is that i feel like such not an expert in electronics that i'm always a little reticent but i may by the time we're done here uh line up a bunch of switches and talk to you guys about the switches that i use maybe we can pop that out as a standalone yeah i even have another one-day build i'm hoping to finish today we will see my estimation is that the sorting of the electronics which is going to involve some extensive foam core drawer separator use and uh re-sorting of the resorting probably about a five-hour gig so yeah i should be done by mid-afternoon we will see all right let's get a vantage point on this puppy what's one you haven't seen what about here huh there's nothing to really latch on to up there is there wait a second we should have power i screwed up i was supposed to be recording for all this i'm really sorry i've walked you through all the areas so i've cleared out almost all of these drawers and adjusted them there's switch overflow i'm going to walk you through all these sections once i have them all done wow so many pieces and parts but the trick is to delineate what i need more than other things so for instance i've got all these pre-wired leds and sockets those all go here because i need them very regularly whereas the less needed stuff like lithium-ion batteries which are more like at the end of the project those can go in here which is over here and then the deeper storage like all the wall warts over here can go over there i haven't even yet started to pull out that crap i've been going for about three hours already yeah so many little things okay oh whoops all right there's so much garbage there is so much garbage um what do these do these are freaking awesome let's see here they look like 12 volts well let's just find out eh yeah why not all right all right so i've managed to tame these five electronic sortimos my very the one that gets the most used is this one with my twist wire lugs my heat shrink wire and my heat shrink can lug connectors then i've got my crimp lugs and some methods for joining wires and doing uh some small bus bars then i've got and you can see i have some room here and i have some room here and i even have a little room here this is electronics and cable routing then we have switches where this is all toggle switches and toggle switch parts and this is all push buttons and pots potentiometers like this thing and panel lights push buttons pots and panel lights yeah so those five plus i've got the five drawers for my electronics food cart going this is arduino open projects clip leads and fairy lights xlr and sound i got fuses i got voltage transformers i got bus bars and connectors and barrel connectors and lugs yes here i've got hold on this one battery holders of every kind this has been in way too deep storage for too long so now what i need to do is go in here and remove this move whatever lighting is let remove whatever writing is there and then i need to actually put these back so i have some room i also have a miscellaneous electronics drawer so when like my friend zach is here and he's like i don't know do you have a blah blah and i'm like i might have it why don't we check this drawer and he'll be like yeah you've got what i need that's how this works here i don't know many times what a thing is but i keep it and i keep it in a place i can find it so um that has dealt with the sortamo rack over there the one you can see is empty and the food the the airplane food cart over here which you can see now is empty that top drawer for all the solder and soldering stuff is good it's good i don't need to adjust it right now but i cannot put these back until i've labeled them so that's the next part oh i forgot i've also got all of this switch overflow here look at this beautiful thing i've got my lit led toggles here single pole single throw i've got a bunch of cheap single pole single throw toggles here i've got some more expensive double pole double throw triple throw etc i've got some toggle protectors here i've got some momentaries yeah got a little bit of everything so yeah it's time to switches that's actually not bad but i'm gonna adjust that oh yeah acetone gets rid of whiteout maybe you didn't know that but now you do all right i think we can start labeling and i feel like this one might look fast yes yes that should be the front of that right because yeah yeah okay so this is switches i feel like i want to do this on the other side wow that is terrible all right come on let's see if i can get this a little bit no i kind of want to be up like this maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe one of the difficulties with a shop like mine is that i'm a generalist and which means i'm constantly shifting the kind of project that i'm working on wow um i'm constantly changing the kind of project that i'm working on uh and that means when i stock things i can't just i sort of have to have a storage system where i can see everything because there's so many different categories it's easy to lose track there are so many categories it's easy to lose track and frankly for electronics i had to kind of wrap my head around exactly i'd spend several months thinking about how i work on electronics and what i like to work with and the way i think about electronics in order to figure out how i wanted to store these and there's always a hierarchical system of like easy to get to versus slightly more difficult to get to that's one then there's how you label it and you know what i've been finding is a good portion of the time the what i write here in white is a little hard to see from a dozen feet away so i'm going to do all my labeling on black tape and apply it here and that makes it very reconfigurable later when i want to reconfigure it i'm going to go on the right side toggles okay the first one i can apply thanks i want to talk about graphics here for a second you might not think of yourself as a graphic designer which is fine that's a very specific trade but even in the arrangement of your own shop graphic the rules of graphic design hold and should be held too and by that i mean when you are showing a list of things in graphic design you don't want that if it's six things that are all in the same category you don't want six different fonts unless they're radically different categories you want to make that bulleted list a bulleted list right it means that everything's indented the same so you know that this is under that heading and the same thing goes for labeling drawers i put this sticker in i put this sorry i put this um piece of tape in with the label and i accidentally centered it and then when i put it here next to this one like my brain was like they're not the same thing they need to be if you're gonna do something follow it along each drawer and it just makes it a little easier and a little faster for your eye to see it yeah and that's graphic design that's communication and good design good design communicates the whole thing to you as quickly as possible unless that's not the point of the design however for the most part since graphic design is a communication medium you want everything that you lay out graphically to communicate to you what that graphic is about as fast as possible you want to make it easy for the eyes to categorize and park things when they're done thinking about them yeah so when you're labeling drawers go ahead and get consistent get bright get high contrast and get figure out your consistency and i swear it'll make it easier for you to see the things that are in all your little compartments yeah all right we're going to keep on going here this is battery holders all right the first hard part is done and my secondary electronic supply shelf uh this part is good this is taking longer than i thought it would or four hours in um now now i have the sword emotes are mostly done but now we've got the um where is it there it is yeah now we've got this storage here these wooden boxes so i've got to get these guys going these are tricky oh we're going to have to really really see this stuff out here what color what color that's the real trick here you got to figure out what color every damn thing is chip on board 12 volt lumens waterproof input no color all right all right this is some lovely cob let's try it out warm white hey that's nobody fiber optics those can go somewhere else ultraviolet warm white that's white that is a wall water oh my god what the hell are these these are other buzz bars christ good lord oh good price all right addressable mofos those are addressable rgbs these are cob headlamps oh i've got even more oh okay it's a ring light what is in there so that's all fiber optics led strip and fiber optics these cob ring lights those could be separate however this chisel can get into a bit of a what the hell what is all this stuff all right there's a lot going on here let's start walking through it okay of the three electronics areas we'll start with the hi there's some lighting hi that's my fluke multimeter saying you've left me on too long i'm shutting myself down thanks for letting me know uh okay so in your shop you are always gonna have multiple levels of access to things and well sorry you might have all sorts of different ways of organizing your stuff but for me personally like for something like electronics or screws or sanding stuff there's the version of it that i use every day there's a version of it i use every month and this version of it i use every year so the deep stuff is the stuff i use once a year the medium stuff is the stuff i use once every month and the best the most accessible is going to be what i can what i need every every week every day so in the deepest yearly storage i've got up there well you see i've got sculpey and modeling stuff then i've got project boxes motors and controllers they come up very rarely then there's these wall warts oh yes you never one never throws out a wall wart whenever one never throws out a wall wart i keep them all they all end up being useful at some point so wall warts power supplies that goes up there um let's get that going that's deep storage so i'm going to put that off to the left it's heavy oh no i can put it way up top great beauty all right moving on moving moving on from there moving on from there i've got some lock line and some other lock line medium sized lock line and then i've got 12 volt car hardware i have more of this in a couple of other places in storage that i've got to locate but like this comes up from time to time and it's good to have it in a specific location um this is fairly fairly esoteric stuff uh but next to it is all sorts of led lighting now here i've got some like custom led units i've got some chip on board headlamps ring lights beacons smaller ring lights i've got el wire i've got mr16s and like household lighting yeah i put handles on these so that they were easy to pull out that actually really makes a difference in whether or not you actually use something oh there we go over here then we can put the custom led stuff right next to it this is definitely more accessible and then last and definitely not least i've got the led strip lights of the multiple colors and i've got my fiber optics i know fiber optics is pretty esoteric but for me i actually dig it this this this this is random electronics i'm gonna label that random electronics and it's gonna go up right here and the cutters the cast casters are going to go upstairs those go upstairs oh great all right that's once a year storage now we've got once uh once a week storage want some yeah once a month storage give or take uh so down here we've got some raspberry pi arduino stuff some breadboard maker kits and some beads and oh oh blinky lights wait a minute those well those can look bad we've got other things like toggle switch and micro switch overflow here they're all in one location so now switches are only in three bins instead of five bins uh here we've got bus bars barrel connectors other connectors other connectors you're always i still have yet to find my perfect solution for like an eight lead connector from one thing to another there is a there are as many systems as there are people and everyone has their favorite battery holders this one now this one's been bouncing around like a stepchild for the longest time it hasn't been getting the respect it's due and now it's here and lives here that's probably maybe one of the bigger innovations of like my electronics brains that goes here um here we've got some uh 12-volt step-down transformers adjustable and otherwise we've got some xlr and audio stuff some voltage panel meters lithium-ion batteries and their chargers and then way up top here it's all solder flux and such so that's the medium storage and i'm really happy with that don't get me wrong there are still some things left by the wayside and then it's always like posing a muppet then it comes to the sortimo sword mode part of them um so this is the sword of mose is the stuff i use on a much more regular basis and now it is really usable to me this is great we've got the pre-wired 12-volt leds all in their colors we've got the incandescents the grain of wheats the auto bulbs the other auto bulbs the other auto bulbs some super secret ones incandescents leds the plugs and the seats oh this is great uh this is 31 and this goes here right above set screws yeah okay then the toggle switches that were there under the the every week these are the much more regularly necessary toggle switches so i've got the rockers and i've got the lit rockers and i've got that oh these little nuts let me tell you when you buy cheap switches from uh from places around the world this is usually the part that is the that looks metal but is like some kind of barely metal uh i've got lots of different toggles and pull switches oh i'm so happy this is number 30 this goes right above the lights then 29 i kind of want to switch those out but i don't have to see about that firing then we've got our lugs and the crimpers plus flashers plus uh uh what do you call it multimeter leads multimeter clip leads of every stripe that's 29. another switchbox now i know this should go next to the other switch box but reordering the numbers of my system is a little more tricky so here is the other switchbox this is all push buttons some custom weird ones and pots potentiometers of many different stripes that's great now when i really need a switch that's where i go i don't have to wonder which place i should be looking this is all my electronics like capacitors farads and excuse me resistors and stuff plus little variable resistors what are those transistors i've got some fans in there and cable routing all my cable routing all those little ways for dressing your cable around the inside of the construction and then the one that gets the most use of any electronics case is this with the heat shrink and now i've servicing it with my favorite heat shrink and i can that's there may still be some adjustment here um but the wire wire nuts my favorites these guys uh plus heat shrink plus some uh solder lugs this is great that's the one i go to every single day and now three four five six six six different sort of modes for my electronics seven different drawers one two three four five six seven yep seven different drawers over there and five drawers over there what is that all total 18 some odd separate drawers for all sorts of things and i still don't know where to put these project boxes if anybody has a need for a gigantic capacitor set i've got two of these i'm not even sure i remember what the shoot was for those um three wire a three three wire um this is the way a lot of people get power into the head of their r2d2 unit with the uh uh uh what the frack do you call these things a slip ring for a wind turbine yes there are a few more things i might like to do with electronic sorting but i have cracked its back i no longer have that random pile of lighting sitting over back there by the sanders that i've been avoiding for literally months and that feels good um but it's memorial day and i've been going at this for five hours and i think you just want to go home and watch watch a movie which is what i'm gonna do thank you guys for joining me for this little bit of shop infrastructure i'm sorry that it was so poorly shot i apologize for that um these are the kind of the lighting there we go hi these are the kind of shoots where i'm just never sure how it's going to turn out so i it's hard for me to talk while i'm doing it because i can't think of its structure and also be thinking of the problem that i'm solving that happens sometimes i did add one more thing to my workbench which is those blue power supplies which you always see me using i've now stuck one underneath my workbench and um boy it is really useful there i need to make a thing for hanging the cords but i use it so often at the bench instead of pulling it out it literally now lives underneath the bench and i mean i guess i could just pull these leads out and turn it off and leave it off most of the time and that makes sense um the extra sortable boxes and project boxes those go back up into the loft and i'll sweep all that up tomorrow morning because yeah it's time to go to be clear i have known that i needed to reorganize all 18 of these bins for the better part of a year and a half sometimes it takes us this long to get to our projects to get to the things i had to really really really wrap my head around what wasn't working in order to figure out what would work that is it's a process man it's a process and you just got to give yourself over to the fact that it's a process it's going to be messy oh that's where that thing went all right i'll see you guys next time bye one of the things i love about this channel is that we don't make how-to videos so much as we make what happened videos and what almost always happens are mistakes and screw-ups in fact they're completely integral to making and honestly to being a person and to celebrate this tested has a new batch of demerit badges for the screw-ups you will encounter in the shop from left to right we have touching your paint job assembling things backwards losing a tiny screw or part gluing your fingers together and smashing your thumb and frankly if you haven't done both of these even if you're not a maker i just don't feel like you've experienced enough of the world i'm not saying get out a hammer and smash your thumb but i will tell you that the blacker your fingernail after the injury the less it's going to hurt in the long run i almost forgot these make excellent additions to your shop apron and they are available at tested dash store dot com\n"