Nails/Screws Caddy/Organizer (not a Tutorial)
by Waldemar Sha in Workshop > Organizing
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Nails/Screws Caddy/Organizer (not a Tutorial)
This is a bit old project and I didn't document it, so it's not a tutorial, but also I'm not the greatest woodworker in history of woodworkers, so you're not loosing very much anyway.
So couple of years I wanted to make something to store my nails kind of organized in the workshop, but at the same time to be able to quickly grab some quantity of a few different sizes for the outside projects (there's definitely too much of a variety going on here as for this reasoning; this thing could of being considerably smaller). And I came up with this design. I haven't seen anithing similar to it yet (maybe there are some examples though) so I'm fealing proud of my originality and want to share the idea.
Basically it's a box with a handle, that contains two rows of glass jars filled, in my case, with nails. It is more convenient to use jars instead of build-in separated sections, because you can take one jar and cary it with you while working, you can flip it to get some nails on your palm easyly, no any stuff like sawdust is falling inside while the lid is closed and it's easier to make the caddy this way. Glass jars are easy to break though so it's up to you afterall.
The construction is pretty simple and you can see everything you need to know on the photos. The boards at the ends are a bit longer than the bottom so they act as feet as well. At the sides I tried to make jars atleast partially wisible to be able to observe the contents (otherwise the labels or markings on the lids are the solution). Also you can see that I used slightly shorter jars where the handle opening is to make the whole construction a bit more compact. The width of the sections where the jars are contained shouldn't be too great to prevent the jars from rattling too much.
For this project I used mostly pine scrap boards I had lying around and some semi-dull hand plane, saw and other tools... there's not much needed as you can imagine. Screws and nails for fastening... and a little bit of PVA glue which did almost nothing because endgrain. I finished the piece with a couple of coats of sunflower oil that were leftowers from potato-chicken-stuff-frying-thing using. It was ok for the project like this but now there's almost nothing left on the surface (everything soaked inside the wood) so I may to reaply it someday.
To be onest I don't use this thing wery often because as I've mentioned usually you don't need 14 sizes/types of nails/screws for a project, but I'm glad I made it anyway, and maybe there's somebody who'll be able to make more use of this design. So thank you for your attention and have a straight nails.