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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If you need to store a lot of small parts, go to a Cabela's (or bass pro shop) and look at the fishing section, plastic boxes with anywhere from 6 to 40 small compartments. Often a far better selection than what you'd find at a home Depot or similar.

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For really small SMD (electronics) parts, you need something with a completely sealed compartment. Anything with removable separators or a gap between the dividers and the lid is a no-go, or you'll be tossing a couple hundred unmarked 0805 MLCCs in the trash because your 100nF and 1uF parts got mixed up together.

The cheap SMD parts containers on AliExpress [1] are reasonably good, although the lid springs some of them will inevitably break. There's probably some professional model with better quality plastics by a reputable brand as well.

[1] https://a.aliexpress.com/_msqygpo

For through-hole and other misc small stuff, I bought some mini plastic baggies and store them in a binder filled with baseball-card storage pages.

A little fiddly to assemble, but now it's really easy to jump to section and clearly see the parts, and takes up less space than a parts bin if you have a few of a lot of parts.

little plastic bags are a bit too flimsy and difficult to handle/organize for my taste.

I settled for small "coin envelopes" labelled with pen and placed on end in a deep shelf bin.

I lucked [0] into being around for an office move of a company that had gone from building physical devices to pure software, and got ~24 parts drawer units [1] for free. For the utility I get out of them, I would have bought them new, but it's hard to know that beforehand - they're expensive for what they are, and to do it right you really need a lot of them to make a uniform wall. I built custom shelves to hold them without the weight adding up, in three vertical columns floor to ceiling.

I'll occasionally see deep sales (~50%) on similar items throughout the year, since presumably the cost basis isn't that high. If I somehow lost mine or needed to expand my storage, I'd plan out some shelves for whatever size the new ones were, and buy enough to fill a few more vertical columns.

[0] They also came with a bunch of assorted stainless machine screw hardware. And this was a month or so after Radio Shack closed and I had spent a week going from store to store buying buying all the switches and lights I longed for in my childhood.

[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Akro-Mils-24-Compartment-Small-P...

> all the switches and lights I longed for in my childhood.

The wonders of the Radio Shack catalog to a child's imagination :)

I prefer these storage bins made by Stanley. They are fairly inexpensive and the small bins are removable so that you can easily grab the whole bin of screws or whatever. This also makes them easy to re-arrange your small parts. If you look around you can find them in two sizes — a thick and thin version.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Stanley-25-Compartment-Shallow-P...

Also, a cabinet for storing the organizers is an easy build for a new woodworker:

https://www.lumberjocks.com/projects/164002

The harbor freight knockoffs of those stanley containers are serviceable too, at half the price. https://www.harborfreight.com/20-bin-medium-portable-parts-s...

I considered the Stanley and HF options and opted for the Stanleys. The HF lid is polyethylene, a little milky, and a little bendy while the Stanley lids are polycarbonate, clear and somewhat stiffer. Neither option will do a good job of preventing small parts from migrating between compartments so I never 'briefcase' carry.

I built a few units similar to this (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/f8/d6/43f8d64f96ae537698a4...) to hold all of them.

Nice! That's my exact plan if I ever get a real garage. I labelled mine on colored masking tape which is a nice way to quickly get to the right contents.

If you buy the right size boxes it works out so that a given multiple of them fits in a paper sized space you can use free filing cabinets for storage.

An alternative is to put things into Ziplock bags and then store in a filing cabinet ---works quite well, esp. for computer cables.

I picked up my storage cabinet with small drawers from a family shop wood store. It's made of wood instead of being plastic, so I placed labels to each drawer to signal the resistors, inductors, capacitors, chips and so on.

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