Storing steel offcuts

[Rgillard]

Hello All,

In my shed at home I have accumulated a big amount of steel offcuts. It ranges from 2" pieces to 20" inch pieces in box, round, angle etc. The bits do come in handy but at the minute they are all thrown in a plastic bin and make finding the piece you want a pain. Also it is starting to take up valuable floor space in the shed. Just wondering whether anyone has built anything to store these parts. I'd prefer not to scrap them but the mess is getting so bad I may have no choice.

Thanks,
Ron

 

[jayste]

I have a "rack" that I store mine on. It's actually a old section of warehouse rack with boards on top. I have most of my "short iron" sitting on it somewhat divided into kinds of steel (tubing, angle, rod, etc.). This sets behind my shop. Since then my SIL was getting ride of a privacy fence I used some of the sections to build a "fence" enclosure around it to kind of pretty it up. I made one side into a sort of gate to access the material inside. It's not out of the elements and allows things to rust up some but works for me. It's the ugly little fenced in area to the far left in the pic below.

 

[Rio_Grande]

I built my bench with a shelf below the same size as the top of the table and toss them in there, that keeps the table upright with the weight. Easy to get to when I need it

 

[jimgerken]

Man do I have a solution for you!. Give me a minute here, got a picture somewhere...
.
Shoot, no pic. Here's the deal: I found a dumpster of conduit one time, and got permission to take the conduit out. It was four inch diameter. It was not new, but in reasonable shape. I think the pcs were 10 footers. I cut it into 2 foot pcs. I stacked it up under a small bench I had, the bench legs were only 4 feet apart side to side. So the conduit chunks stacked up under there and almost filled the space. The result was about 40 neat pigeon hole tubes to slip the odds and ends into. The steel cutoffs can be longer if they hang out of the back, up against the wall. This keeps the stock seprated and easy to find later. Wish I had a pic, its really slick looking. You probably get the idea though.

 

[czechsonofagun]

I have 5 gallon bucket next to the lathe for round pieces, space under the work table - 4'x8' for big pieces and a drawer for odds and shapes.

When I don't see what I need right away, I put on gloves and start digging - :thumbsup: - the system has some shortcomings.

 

[petes]

I'm struggling with the same issue. I've got all sorts of <3ft pieces of angle, pipe, tube, flat bar, etc. under my workbench lined up and roughtly sorted by shape. Problems with that system are it's not space efficient, hard to get to stuff on the bottom, and what to do with pieces that are longer than the bench is deep, but not really long enough to stand on end where I keep my longer stock.

I'm planning soon to build a rack (3x vertical tubes with 12 inch long horizontal "pegs" out the sides like a double sided "E", add casters on the bottom and all sized to fit under the bench. This will allow me to put it in sideways so I can put up to 4ft long stock on it, and roll it out to get to the back side.) I'll probably put a solid bottom tray on at least one shelf for really short bits.

 

[not2old]

Sorry for the poor picture, but it shows my storage rack. One-half of an oil drum, welded to an old chair base, with dividers welded in to help everything stand up. Not very fancy, but it works well. It's easy to look for different materials. Anything too short to stand above the rim is segregated into milk crates that I store on top of each other. Anything longer than about six feet is stored horizontally on another rack that I've not had time to rebuild since I moved last fall. I will be watching for a better solution if there is one.

 

[Iplayfarmer]

Here's an idea...

Make a box out of any kind of scrap: plywood, wafer board, metal, etc. make the box slope so that the front is the height of your short pieces and the back is the high enough to hold your long pieces. I'd suggest the back be at least half as high as the long pieces. Get a piece of field wire, hardware cloth, or hog panel, the stuff that looks like a grid. Fasten the grid accross the angled top of your box and store the cutoffs upright. You could arrange them accross the front according to shape and diameter and back according to length.

Here's a picture since I don't have a thousand words to describe what I'm talking about.

 

[Kernopelli]

I have a 4' metal shelving unit that was made originally to go inside of service trucks. The shelves have just a slight angle forward, the sides are boxed in and the fronts have a lip so things don't slide out. The top shelf is flat and has about 6 removable bins like some of these McMaster-Carr and each one holds the small drop cuts I make..."Round stock" , "Angle", "Plate", "Tube", etc. They will hold an amazing amount of most types of steel when it's placed neatly inside. Each shelf below is used as a rack for the specific type of longer/bigger pieces. The same thing could be easily made out of steel or lumber.

I had a real mess before I started keeping everything organized/separated. It's really nice to be able to keep it stored in a manner that you can easily find exactly what you want when you need it.

 

[rjmack]

i just bought a cheap metal shelving unit for the smaller stuff, that way it's all laid out, and i can see everything and i can organize stuff that would otherwise just be a mess at the bottom of a pail. sorry, no pics today.

i like the rolling barrel for longer pieces.:thumbsup: