How do you store your metal ?

[Glenn]

How do you store your metal stock?  Racks (vertical or horizontal), laying down, standing, hung from the rafters, A frame racks, etc ?  Photos help and we will not judge.

We use multiples of 20 feet, that is to say two 10 foot sections, four 5s, five 4s, six 3s, 2s, etc.  Each length standing up in its own 5 gallon bucket.  That way we can pull the length we need without having to make the long pieces shorter when you already have a short piece.

[George N. M.]

I store my steel horizontally on the wall of a 12' x 12' horse stall in a rack made of 2x4s screwed to the studs at an upward angle.  Not as ideal as a steel rack but it works.  Anything shorter than 16" is stored vertically, either in buckets or leaned against the wall.  I would like to have more slots for different sizes.  Now, there are racks for squares, rounds, and flats and I sometimes have to dig for the size I want within each category.  This means I sometimes get a surprise.  "I didn't know I had that!"  High carbon stock and scrap are stowed in a separate box as well as what WI I have.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Chad J.]

I don't have a lot yet,  low carbon on one side of the shop,  high carbon in the other, leaning up against the wall.  In a couple weeks I'm going to get the last of the tear out debris out of the barn and I'll set up a rack.

[Scott NC]

  In a storage unit in Fremont, Nebraska.  Yes, I still have stuff in storage.  It's cheap though.  Friends are wonderful.  Now I have to figure a plan to get it here.

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

I guess what our metal storage would be called organized chaos. We'll start with very large stuff stored on rebar racks along a wood line about a hundred feet from the shop. Some very large expanded metal with angle iron frame panels that a neighbor had built for his dog runs, on the other side of the cabinet. He gave it to us when he moved years ago. A steel dynamite cabinet and a lot of other stuff.

By the walk-in garage door, mostly high carbon steel.

On the north side, an old large welding table I built decades ago, pressed into service as a storage rack.

On the left of the welding table & shop. A mix of all kinds of stock on concrete blocks lined up along the drop-off about 12 feet of fill when we built the garage & shop.

Finally the ever present stuff lined up along the blacksmith shop wall next to the welding table. I was forced to move it all when we painted the garage. Also there are buckets and large wooden ammo boxes full of all sorts of small stock inside the shop that I didn't take pictures of.

[BillyBones]

I scored these really sweet heavy duty shelves a couple years ago to store my stock on. Then the wife found them and they are set up in the barn for what ever she needs to put out there. 

[Scott NC]

  There are heavy duty storage racks that have plastic "wedges" to hold up the shelves.  It's all strong steel including the shelves and legs but those wedges are plastic.  I wish I could describe them better.  We used to store our canned goods on them in the basement and that get's heavey.  Now I use them for buckets of steel "shorts".  I will search for an image.

[Daswulf]

The ones with two half rounds that clip over a notch on the leg and the round on the shelf corner wedges over?

[Scott NC]

  Those are the ones, Aric.  I got three of them from a friends wife that works at Pizza Hut.

[seldom (dick renker)]

all lean against the wall for now in all lengths up to 10

feet.

 

[ThomasPowers]

Well I found a sales rack for metal from a big box store at the scrapyard; that holds some of my shorts...

[BillyBones]

Like these? This is how the corners of mine are held. Steel hooks and no plastic. The shelves are 8' tall, 8' long and about 3' deep. My seldom clean hand for a size comparison. 

[Scott NC]

  If I ever have one collapse on me because of plastic wedge clips I will do a write up for the safety forum.  So far so good....in the mean time.... Don't try this at home!  Disclaimer:  I don't pile them so full they lean omoniously and creak a lot.

[Frosty]

The plastic round slip wedges are under compression, the load would have to either burst the ring or crush the tubing. The "slips" "design" is the common rod dog used on oil drills. I don't know why they call them slips, they don't.

Frosty The Lucky. 

[ThomasPowers]

Cause you slip them into the hole to hold the drill string when adding or removing a joint to it?

[Frazer]

A fine example of "nothing more permanent than a temporary solution". I slapped up some 2x4s when I moved in to get steel off the ground. Long stuff is on the wall, short stuff and HC has a bucket system.

[Glenn]

I like the "slip stick" for when you need calculations. (grin)

[Frazer]

Good to have a back up in case I run out of AAA batteries.

[ThomasPowers]

Reminds me of an OLD SF story, 1930's?  where they had a 300' slide rule in an aircraft hanger to get enough precision on their space travel calculations---it was motorized too and the operator rode on an attached seat.

[Frosty]

7 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

Cause you slip them into the hole to hold the drill string when adding or removing a joint to it?

I need a "slapping my forehead" emoji. That sounds awfully logical though. 

We used a bale and cam type rod dog before we got the rod arm with the hydraulic rod camp and breakout wrench. Knew what slips are, just never used them. Wrong kind of drilling to need to hold a couple few thousand feet of rod. 200' was about our deepest. 

I remember the 300' slip stick! Not a "Skylark" story, Lensman maybe? It's the kind of fantastic tech E.E. Doc Smith was known for but I don't recall him writing time travel stories. Clifford Simak? 

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[Purple Bullet]

I have (or used to have... haven't seen it lately) a circular slide rule my dad used to use for drilling calculations. Mostly mud weights I think. I don't recall the 300' slide rule, but if they had made it circular it would have fit nicely in the disk section of the Enterprise. 

[JHCC]

13 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

Reminds me of an OLD SF story, 1930's?  where they had a 300' slide rule

Slide rules had fallen out of fashion by the time I came along, although pocket calculators were all the rage. My literary introduction to them was reading an old copy of "Storm" by George Stewart (1941, described as the first "eco-novel") , where the hotshot young meteorologist at the Weather Bureau bemoans that he hasn't had any use for his beloved slide rule, as the old school Chief relies heavily on experience and intuition rather than equations and calculations when making his forecast. He gets some degree of vindication, however, when the Chief turns to him for a specific prediction when lives are on the line on a disabled ship in a storm; he later decides to stay at the Bureau and not take up a job with an airline.

[ThomasPowers]

I was at the transition too; I remember the first pocket calculator at my High School; all it did was addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and didn't have a keyboard, you made electrical contact with a metal stylus that had a wire running to the calculator.  It also cost HUNDREDS of dollars! I used an HP55 in college with RPN.

I don't think the 300' one was E.E. Doc; either, perhaps CS.  I got to where when reading old SF my mind automatically put in "pocket calculator" anytime a scientist or engineer whipped out their slide rule.    Now how many of you have thought of putting a sealed metal ammo can full of solar powered calculators deep in a mine hopefully protected from EMP?   (My Father had an engineer that as a pre WWII Frat initiation had to memorize the log tables.  Turned out very useful as he was Chinese and in WWII the Japanese confiscated all the log books for their war effort and having memorized them he was able to continue working as an engineer in China.

[Purple Bullet]

One of the first books I ever checked out from the library  was R.A. Heinlein's "Have Space Suit, Will Travel". In it the hero gets a bad case of frostbite (on Pluto) and aliens nurse him back to health in a room that looks just like his room at home. He wakes up and is trying to figure out time/distance and asks the heroine to hand him the slide rule on his desk. She replies that it was part of the desk, not a real slide rule. Made me curious and yes, I actually used one for a while. When I was a senior in high school the large school I attended had one of the early "computers". It took up a whole desk top, used nixie lights and Thomas, your RPN calculator would run rings around it.

[George N. M.]

In the early '80s I went to work for a mud logging company (Thomas will relate) and you had to have a pocket calculator.  I didn't have one and money was tight enough that I didn't want to buy one.  So, I dug out my old slide rule.  The other trainees who were 10-15 years younger had never seen one in use and were amazed at what you could do with an "analog" instrument.  And it didn't need batteries!

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."