Lol, ok. Here goes.

So parts get labeled, right? Often with stickers, or someone paints on the bucket or the bin, or on the wall next to the shelf, or something like this. This is ok.

The problem comes when parts need to be shuffled. In the beginning, you may have few enough axles that they all fit into a 4" bin. Eventually, depending on your policy regarding how stock is managed, you are likely to have enough that you need to shuffle the axles into a 6" bin. And after that, an 8" bin.

This goes for any kind of parts. The giant tub you keep your seats in may eventually be more appropriate for tubes, while the seats get hung on a wall, or put on shelves. Your helmets may outgrow the shelf space they occupy and need to be moved into the shed, and now something else goes on the shelf where the helmets were.

The point is, shuffling. At our shop it happens constantly, at least once a month something gets shuffled from one storage space to another (sometimes stock gets downsized as well).

Previously, it was a tedious process of re-labeling with paper adhesive labels. Eventually there would be a dozen labels on top of one another, like paint in an old house. Not catastrophic, but wasteful, tedious, and inelegant.

The alternative - and this is just as common - is for a place, a shelf or a bin or whatever, to be permanently assigned to a part. I've seen this all over the country, and even in a lot of home workshops. In these cases the storage scheme is fixed, even when it needs to evolve or adapt. I'm sure everyone can think of some corner of their shop where some category of part has been crammed for years if not decades, regardless of whether it works really well there or not. Often this is facilitated by some really cool artwork/lettering that consecrates that spot for that thing. Cool art now tragically enables dysfunction to get institutionalized.

You probably get the idea by now. In a public shop, labels are super important. In a shop where the influx and outflow of parts varies drastically, being able to change labels without collateral is golden.

Up until now, while we have always sorted parts meticulously, we defaulted to not labeling the places we kept them because of the repeatedly validated intuition that it would need to be changed unpredictably. This new idea allows us to potentially have *the best of both worlds*.

@Josh Bisker: Thanks for being supportive of my outburst ;)

@Rebecca Owens: Today I bought 1.88"x5yds rolls of "dry erase tape" at Staples for just under $7.00 as an initial experiment. If it works well I'll look at cheaper sources online.

I'll try and remember to report back how well or wow terribly this works.

-cyclista Nicholas


On 2018-01-28 23:09, Josh Bisker wrote:

And pics showing how you mean to use 'em? I'm super supportive of your
excitement! Just can't picture what's making you feel it :)

Josh Bisker
914-500-9890

New York Mechanical Gardens Bike Co-op <http://bikecoop.nyc/>
596 Acres <http://596acres.org/>
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus <http://bindlestiff.org/>

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 4:41 PM, rebecca owens <rebowens33@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Do you have a source or a link for these dry erase stickers? Thanks,
Rebecca

🐾

> On Jan 27, 2018, at 10:12 PM, "cyclista@inventati.org" <
cyclista@inventati.org> wrote:
>
> OMG has everyone heard of dry erase tape and dry erase stickers?!
>
> I was lamenting today that the hot glue idea wouldn't work for tires,
and then I thought dejectedly about how badly adhesive labels always work
out. I suddenly had the thought that what would be awesome would be labels
that were dry erase, and then I thought someone must have already invented
that, and surely enough they exist!! Hell yeah!!
>
> They're a little on the expensive side, but at least for our shop this
will revolutionize our ability to label parts storage. Also a lot of
community shops are probably set up to get them donated.
>
> -cyclista Nicholas
>
>
>> On 2018-01-26 08:39, cyclista@inventati.org wrote:
>> I immediately went and wrote down that bit about the hot glue
>>> On 2018-01-26 01:23, Josh Bisker wrote:
>>> Pals, we've got a bunch of long skinny red u-line bins (like 4" x 18")
on a
>>> couple long shelves now that are BALLING. They're super easy access for
>>> people to get their hands on small and medium sized parts. What are
your
>>> like, top ten or top twenty small or medium sized things that people
need
>>> to get ahold of? What would I not think of, but you're like "oh folks
>>> actually need XYZ like all the damn time"? Or do you have cautionary
tales,
>>> like "don't put fifteen pounds of M5 bolts in one of those, they will
get
>>> mixed up immediately with other things and it will suck"?
>>> Also check it: we're going to take a tip from Kickstand in Vancouver
and
>>> hot-glue the part itself to the front of the bin, so that no one needs
to
>>> remember just what a thing is called to have access to the magic.
>>> Josh Bisker
>>> 914-500-9890
>>> New York Mechanical Gardens Bike Co-op <http://bikecoop.nyc/>
>>> 596 Acres <http://596acres.org/>
>>> Bindlestiff Family Cirkus <http://bindlestiff.org/>
>>> ____________________________________
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