Tonight I decided to take on the next chapter in “Operation: Organize my Parts!” (OOP). Since I didn’t want to start a very large project, I decided to move my electrolytic capacitors into some Plano 3449 boxes. I’ve been using the little Ziploc bags that they came in when I bought them and that’s not such a bad solution. However, I had all of the little bags of caps crammed into one larger Ziploc bag and that was inconvenient to have to pull them all out and sort through them every time I needed one.
Since electrolytic capacitors are considerably larger than resistors, the envelope method I used to organize my resistors wasn’t practical. So, I decided that I’d give each capacitor value it’s own compartment in the Plano box. Currently, I only keep 10 different values so this isn’t bad since it will only require two boxes to store them all.
To label the compartments to make the values easy to identify, I added a new worksheet to the Plano 3449 – Electronic Organization file. I created a page of labels that can be used to print something similar to the envelopes used before except that for these the paper is folded and taped so that one of the labels is visible from the bottom of the box and one is visible when the box is open. This makes it very easy to find the right box and to identify the parts when the box is open.
This solution has worked very well and will save me a lot of time in the future that would have been spent rummaging through Ziploc bags. If you want to use this solution, download the Excel file and use the “Electrolytic Capacitor Labels” worksheet. I hope this solution helps someone else as much as it has me.
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| View from the bottom of the Plano box. | View from inside the Plano box. |
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