"Organizing Your Screws"

There has been a long-term disagreement over "square drive." It seems that Robertson, a Canadian, invented the square drive. Okay — so it is the Robertson square drive which has become so popular here.    So when I saw that Lee Valley has as a "new product" a wide assortment of "new Robertson screws" I thought it might be a good time to get a sampling of all the screws they list — particularly since the "new Robertson" head accepts Phillips and square drive.    So I asked my good friend at Lee Valley to send one box of each. And he did.
	I set Andrea to the task of making sense out of all the boxes. I had two goals for her — first) I wanted them organized in a way that I could find the exact screw quickly and second) I wanted to have the Lee Valley order number with the box so that when the time came to re-order, I didn't have to  find the catalog page.
That is quite an assortment of flat head, pan head, all sizes, different thread types, etc. And some of the screws are on back order.
	I had to really dig through the early pages of this website to find any glimpse of the large parts drawer chests I made for the shop in 1993 when I first set up a "professional" shop — and Maureen is always a pleasant site anyway.    The reason for this trip to memory lane is to point out a need I had then. Basically, the closest hardware/home center was 40 minutes away. That meant that any time I needed a nut or bolt, I would literally waste several hours, not to mention gas.    The parts chest became the answer. I simply sat down with a parts catalog and ordered boxes of each type that I thought I would need.
The large parts chest is great when I am in the shop. And that pretty much is where I am, but there is a good percentage of contractors/finish carpenters. installers, etc. who take their shop with them to the site.  Forgetting a certain type of screw, nut, bolt, or connector, can really screw things up — and throw a monkey wrench into schedules and costs.    So, I thought, "what about the Festool Sys-1 Box — a Systainer with the different sizes of inserts.

	So that was Andrea's next task — fill the boxes with screws  and make some type of order out of them. You can see that she is also inserting the box end flaps into each storage box.
She is done but only after leaving a number of boxes out of the assortment.    We also have a need to have a storage box for the myriad of specialty items, such as Conformat type screws, 5mm hinge and slide bolts, pocket screws, long cabinet mounting screws, — the list goes on.
	Here it is. I will call it "Screw One." I think it will be as handy as some of the other screw collections in the shop, like the Kreg assortment of pocket hole screws. And it definitely will cut down on spurious trips to the hardware store. That saves time and money.    By the way, have you figured out how the screws don't get totally jumbled when the case gets dropped or overturned in the truck? The black portion of the lid is a closed-cell piece of foam material that when the lid is locked close, it seals each of the individual boxes — neat, (not that I would  ever turn the case upside down.)
	So I ordered another one. This may all seem like a considerable expense, except for one thing: what is the cost for not having the right screw, nut or bolt in terms of a special trip to the hardware store, gas for that trip, time away from the jobsite — and, trying to make do with the wrong part.