I spent A LOT of time organizing all the hardware and small parts today. I saw a video by Adam Savage talking about his hardware rig from Sortimo, but those things are very expensive. Further research shows that Harbor Freight has a cheaper copy that should do the job just fine. I ended up buying several of these medium size cases and a few of these larger sized ones.
The first step was sorting out all the bolts, nuts and washers. I wanted to put them into the same case since they are typically pulled for use at the same time. I was actually able to fit all of the nuts, bolts, washers, screws and some other bits into one case!
In another medium case, I stuck all the nutplates and blind rivets. I ended up keeping them in their plastic baggies, to help them from migrating into each other. I am going to purchase some little baggies for my nut and bolt case for this same reason. The cases do a decent job of keeping stuff separate, but those little thin washers are hard to control!
For all the other small bits and pieces, I used a medium case and a large case. I was able to fit about 90% of these small parts in the cases, so it’ll make it easy to keep track of them until I need them.
For the rivets, I decided to reuse the Husky wall mount parts organizer that I used in my tail kit. I really like being able to pull the draw out containing the rivet size I needed and carry to my work bench. Keeping the rivets in their baggies helps to prevent accidents and hours of picking up rivets. The wing has a lot more different sizes of rivets in both AN470 and AN426 versions. I consolidated all the left-over rivets from the tail kit with the ones from the wing kit and they all fit in the husky wall mount:
At the end of the day, this all seems like a very small amount of work done for over 6 hours of labor, but a lot of time was spent counting, sorting and consolidating hundreds upon hundreds of nuts, bolts, washers, screws, rivets, etc. I am not completely done just yet either. I still have to sort out the bushings and the aileron mount sub-kit and think of what I want to do with the SB sub kit. Since its related to the ailerons, I will probably consolidate them into one case. I’ll work on them tomorrow, 6+ hours of sorting is enough for one day 🙂
Here’s all the photos:
Google Photos Link: https://goo.gl/photos/YVEDbLxjz5DE22rb6
Hours Worked: 6.5