Thread: Storage trays for drawers

I recently bought some more drawers to store smaller items such as drill bits, taps & dies, reamers, etc, and of course ran into the eternal issue of how to keep them organised inside the drawer. One idea that works well is to make trays contoured to individual items, and to keep each tray in place, pin them to pegboard laid flat in the bottom of the drawer. However that is a very time consuming exercise, and isn’t convenient for expanding to accommodate more items.

Custom-trays-located-on-pegboard.jpg

My latest idea is to make multiple sizes of shallow trays, sized so that they can be arranged and rearranged as needed to evenly fill each drawer. The drawers I’m working with have an internal clearance of 260 mm front-to-back x 560 mm wide, so I sized the trays in multiples of 260/8 mm lengthwise and 560/16 mm widthwise. By suitably arranging different sized trays I can fill the entire space in each drawer (using empty trays if necessary) which stops them moving around when opening or closing the drawer, avoiding the need for pegboard or some other means to keep them in place.

Trays-in-drawer.jpg

In order to print them without it taking forever I am using a 1.2 mm nozzle with a 0.6 mm layer height, and both wall & bottom thickness set to 1.2 mm. (I am using a Taz 6 printer fitted with an E3D Volcano Titan Aero toolhead, and slicing with SuperSlicer.) I had to spend quite a bit of time adjusting the print profile so single line walls would print correctly, but it was worth it to be able to print several trays at once in under an hour.

For anyone interested, I’ve attached the Fusion 360 file. To adjust the tray size, alter the Parameters listed under Favorites. It should be possible to get good results printing them with a smaller nozzle, probably a size that divides 1.2 mm evenly, but it would of course take longer.

Nice job on the trays.

Im still using the zillions of small plastic drawers taken from the small sets of plSTIC drawers I used to have (still have a stack of these sets that I use for electronics stuff)
You can also see I'm using a few sets of cutlery drawer inserts inherited when SWMBO decided to change things around in the kitchen cupboARDS.
Imperials.JPG Metrics.JPG

These compact 3D printed spanner racks normally meant for vertical storage can also be used in drawers.
spannersAF.JPG
Same rack can be used for files etc
fikles.JPG