Bulk assorted fasteners

I'm fed up with the "Where's Waldo" machine shop and we are going to do a REAL organizational thrust. I've given orders to be absolutely ruthless throwing things away. We'll buy some bin/shelf units for good stuff. I bet we end up with 4 or 5, 5-gal buckets full of assorted fasteners. About 1/8 will be SHCS, 1/4 will be damaged or junk and the rest will be hex-heads, nuts and washers and they will all be dirty. I've kept them around for years and have picked through them on the occasional emergency and thanked God once in a while. And, if somebody pays attention to the drawers, we wouldn't ever need them. Are these really worth sorting through? I'll bet it will. take two guys for two days to sort and stow with no guarantee we'll need them any time soon if ever.

Reply to
Tom Gardner
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They are worth sorting through to have some extra stuff on hand (think

10-20 lbs), but not worth it to sell them and maybe not even worth it to save money on buying -- unless you know that you have a lot of specific ones that you happen to need all the time. i
Reply to
Ignoramus1983

BEWARE!

Anything you throw away, you will need within three days.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

Donate them to a thrift store. No, donate them to several thrift stores, since no one store will be able to cope with that many.

Reply to
Leo Lichtman

On Apr 19, 3:50 pm, "Tom Gardner" wrote: Are these really worth sorting through? I'll bet

Just sort out corroded, bent, damaged, or otherwise useless fasteners and toss those. Don't bother to sort the other ones except maybe SHCS, Hex Head, into different buckets. Don't bother to sort by size. Then stow them away until you need them. If you find that you use a particular style more frequently than others. You will find that they might come in handy sometimes, and you won't get the nasty tease when you need something desperately and you find one until you realize that the entire head is stripped out or something similar. Also, make sure that you make some sort of rule regarding usage. In other words, decide if you want to keep these only for emergencies, do you want people to use them first and try to use up what you have before you buy new ones, etc. Do you want people adding to the pile or do you want them to just throw things out from now on. We have a rule that only new bolts are allowed in the new bolt bins. Once they've been used, they go into a different bin. Otherwise people actually start contaminating the new stuff with used stuff. For example, someone will have a job where they cut a bolt to length. When they put it back, they put it into the bin for the current (cut) length, except that when someone else goes to use it, they find it has been cut down. Hope this gives some ideas ww88

Reply to
woodworker88

Tom,

You must be a better business manager than myself. I need a list of jobs like this for when my equipment breaks down or when an order is cancelled, or when???

Better to have job like this than to just give everybody a broom.

Maybe you don't have unplanned events at your shop

Karl

Reply to
Karl Townsend

See what the scrapyard will give you for it, at least, rather than dumpsterizing it. Or offer it up to the employees for the home shop coffee-can-o-random fasteners.

If you have a low level employee with occasional time to occupy, the stuff could be gradually organized, but it does not take overly long before nice new boxes of 100 from MSC or McMaster cost less and get more done. But you have to stock the organized shelves well enough that you thank God for them, rather than cursing yourself for throwing out the junk.

Next trick is to make it shop policy that no NEW buckets of random fasteners occur - stuff has to go back into the correct bin, or else the problem recurs.

There might be a part-time job for someone from the local place that tries to find jobs for people with challenges - where most folks might find sorting stuff to be boring, certain folks will find it a highly satisfying job, and be a lot better at it than someone who considers it a bore.

Reply to
Ecnerwal

I like to take the job of sorting things like this in an incremental fashion.

By looking, you could see that some items are more common than other things so you have 5 or 6 categories for the preliminary sorting. You scoop a small pile out of the bucket and while drinking coffee or having a staff meeting, pick through the small pile and deposit each item into the appropriate pile One of these will be junk to toss and the others might be nuts, machine screws, washers bolts and others.

When this task is done then each one of the sub groups can be sorted by thread, length or whatever you find convenient.

In a couple of months all the junk will be tossed, and the good stuff sorted into the used bins.

Reply to
Roger Shoaf

I've got three five gallon buckets I need to go through. What I want is one of those MONGO four foot high five foot wide racks of a hundred bins or so. That should take care of about half of the stuff.

I have a lot of the .22 shells, too. What do you do with those? I don't own a powder gun, but if I did, I wouldn't have to buy any shells for a few years.

Maybe I NEED a powder gun ............ :-)

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

Reminds me of a sheet metal shop I used to work at. The floor around the PEM hardware insertion machines would always have half a dozen of various types of PEM hardware. After months of watching these get swept up and thrown in the trash, I began picked up a few here and there whenever I was walking through the area. Never made special trips, just picked up those in front of me.

One day the boss sees me pick up and pocket a couple. Asks what I'm doing, and I explained, well, they're being swept and thrown away, so I'm picking up a few here and there.

In his typical short sightedness, he decreed that henceforth ALL dropped PEM hardware will be swept up and deposited into buckets for future sorting and placement back into the bins.

When I left a few years later, I'll bet there was at least

50lbs of PEM hardware in buckets. He was too cheap to pay anyone to sit there and sort them, but couldn't throw them away!

Jon

Reply to
Jon Anderson

Hi Tom

I used to accumulate about 30 gallons of "hardware" and get it all cad plated. The stuff went to the platers in real dirty condition and came back looking almost like new. I had bins for each of everything I sorted and kept. So, in my case it was probably worth the effort. Sorting time was the most costly part of the job. I usually ended up doing it myself because I hated to pay a good employee to sort hardware.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Martes

I figure I can buy new grade 5 or 8 fasteners for a few dollars per pound, know what I have in terms of plating, strength, size, etc. A 5 gallon bucket might weigh 60 to 100 pounds, if it was full of new grade

5 bolts it might be worth a couple hundred bucks. full of scrap it is worth 2% of that.

I'd probably stack themin the corner, if you have a downtime, some employee can sort it. Other wise, see if you use ANY of it, toss it in

12 m> I'm fed up with the "Where's Waldo" machine shop and we are going to do a
Reply to
RoyJ

Let's put it this way. What would they be worth if sorted, and would you take a job for that much from somebody doing that kinda work?

I ask myself this when returning a bad jug of milk to the grocery store. For $2, would I take a job waiting in the return line there?

Reply to
Richard J Kinch

But then cad became a haz mat and you don't do it anymore? A friend and neighbor of mine builds custom cars. He used to send a couple of gallons of a car's hardware to be cad'ed and it cost him $50. For the car that he's working on now, it will be $275. He's considering other options.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Engelhardt

Tom Gardner wrote: (...)

I would see this as an opportunity to do something stupid and fun!

Acrylic tube in parking lot angled upward with holes along side, flute style. Bucket under each hole. Shop vac blowing into bottom of tube, with a vent to control flow. With full face shield, dribble hardware in the top and have it sort itself into buckets by aerodynamic profile and mass.

Post pictures.

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

I told three techs to attack the machine shop but spend no more than a half hour a day on it. I figure they won't get overwhelmed and they will get better ideas of how to organize. They have two months to make it into a showroom. I'll continue to put a big dent in it myself as an inspiration. What got me going is that I put the new BP 50' away and set up the tooling and a work table in such a way that mill time is maximized and no time is spent looking for tooling and what's needed...it's right there in it's place. Well gee, everybody likes that so we want to duplicate that success. I figure at least 3 man-hours a day gets wasted working around the mess and looking for stuff.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

That's a tough call. The bigger the fastener you have, the more money you can potentially save by sorting them out- I don't believe I'd bother with stuff under 1/2", maybe 3/8" if I was feeling really industrious. That includes the washers, they're going to slow things down some.

What about talking to one of the local temporary help businesses? If you can get someone at minimum wage for a day or two they might be able to save you some money. Where I am, the temp people charge the employee's wage plus 50%, might be worth it and might not.

John

Reply to
JohnM

We did exactly this at a place I used to work. The person who sorted the hardware and cleaned the chips from the machine at the end of the day turned out to be a godsend. He not only did crap like this that nobody else wanted to do, but he had a positive attitude that became contagious throughout the shop. Looking back he was worth every penny we paid him plus due to the increased productivity.

Reply to
NOTME

"Tom Gardner" wrote in news:wpXVh.1351$H snipped-for-privacy@newssvr21.news.prodigy.net:

Tom, Google search 5s

Reply to
Anthony

A half hour is about enough time to get some momentum going and come up with a plan, then pack up and get back to something else.

When I am tasked with a job like that, I like to have a set period defined by pauses, such as "first thing in the morning, till coffe break", or "from coffe break till lunch" sorta thing.

I find it allows me to get into a forward motion kind of state, and get things done. Makes it easy to switch directions, too.

That's me.

Cheers Trevor Jones

Reply to
Trevor Jones

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