I went scrounging around my garage and house and found all the mismatched screws lying around in various places, then organized them all by length and put then in labeled little drawers.
Woodworker here: This is incredibly exciting
I started doing this then realized how much time and money I was wasting buying things that I already had (but couldn’t find). 'Am up to about 10 cases of thing now and still have more to organize. New cases are cheap compared to what they hold.
It is a joy to be able to lay my hands on just the right fitting when I need one now.
I work on boats and have buckets of old stainless steel fasteners. About once a year I sit and organize them and put them into inventory. Very easy to make a decent hourly wage when each screw costs 25¢ or more.
If you do this long enough, you’ll end up with a collection of storage boxes scattered all over your garage and house.
Pro-tip: making sure that the boxes are transparent only helps when you find the right box …
… don’t ask me how I know.
Semi pro tip.
Buy a label maker and label all the boxes.
Drywall stuff (and misc)
Machine screws (and misc)
Router bits (and misc)
The “misc” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there :-)
Labeling is great! But I save my label maker for fancy pants uses. Blue tape and Sharpies FTW.
What level of accuracy are we talking about on those screw lengths? I wouldn’t accept more than one diameter variance.
