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For years I've disliked my ineffective method for storing my random orbital sander, sand paper, and other sanding and scraping supplies. What was my method? Throw it all in a giant heap! Of course the sandpaper would get dinged up, it was hard to keep track of how much and where various grits where, and I never knew when I was about to run out of something until I was in the middle of sanding a project. Fun! So I finally broke down between projects and designed and built this sanding supplies organizer. It's made up of lots of scrap wood. Heck, the top and bottom, which are 5/8" ply that was so warped I had to clamp out about 1 1/4" of deflection, if not more. It is a giant mix of materials (hardy board for the back and removable inserts for ROS disks, birch ply for 4 of the 5 vertical members, 5/8" ply for the top and botom, cherry for edge banding for the front, and beech or something for the dowels that help keep the ROS disks in there proper locations). That doesn't matter. This was designed to be functional and keep things organized. It isn't the prettiest project I've built but I think it accomplishes my goal coming into this.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of working on the project was some of the finder details.. I attached the cherry edge banding using the wood whisperers method (oversized, then remove off excess vertically at the table saw. I also built and used the simple jig the Wood Whisperer recently covered for making dados in order to dado in the vertical members. This worked very well and produced very tight dado's.

I made a small template and used it with a flush trim bit to put the small indent on the front of the sheet shelves to make it easer to pull out full 9×11" sheets of sand paper. These shelves and those for the ROS disks can slide in and out (the rest are glued in place). I cut small handles that are glued onto the front of the ROS disk shelves using a small dado. The handle is raised up about 3/16", the thickness of the hardy board, which simply lays behind front handle and is prevented from falling off the back by a small strip glued back there. In other words you can pull out the shelves by reaching under and pulling from below, and you can remove the hardy board insert that has the dowels that hold the disks to make it easier to load up with new supplies or some day made again if the hole pattern needed to be changed.

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Comments

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Great idea and my next project.Thanks very much.
 

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169 Posts
Very nice Will.
 

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Nice organizer/storage!

Lew
 

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I really like (and need) this
Well done!
 

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nicely done Will
 

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nice organizer, well done
 

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I agree, nicely done. I've been torn between making a dedicated sanding storage station and just dedicating one of the sides of my modular storage units ( http://lumberjocks.com/Kristoffer/blog/14041 ) to sanding supplies. I should be moving my shop pretty soon when we close on our house this month, and I'll just wait to see what the space says to me.
 

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Hey Kristoffer, I remembering seeing your project! It looks like yours would work fine for ROS disks, but I don't think your openings are big enough for full 9×11 sheets, if that's important to you. I envy your dado set. I had to do all the dados for my shelves at the table saw with a standard 1/8" blade. That meant making one cut, then adjusting the fence very carefully by about 1/16" of an inch (slightly over really) in order to make a 2nd pass to open up the gap for a piece of 3/16" cherry poly to slide on in. On the other hand this allowed me to really finess the fit and get it just right, something I'm not sure I could have done with shims, although maybe with one of those fancy dial-a-width dados. Anyhow, I'm very happy I finally built this. Eventually once I obtain and get into planes I intend to build another storage cabinet for planes, chisels, and marking tools (squares, cutting gauge, etc.).
 

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Very Nicely done Will. I too must do this right now the sand paper is stacked in a corner of may bench and I have no Idea how much of each grit I have. This will be my next project thanks for sharing.
 

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Love this thing….on the short list of projects when I get home from deployment.
 

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Nice storage!

Are you going to wall-mount it?

Is your vacuum switch/outlet mounted or is it just stored in the cubby?

The only thing I see missing is a place for scraps. I have a growing pile of still useable discs/sheets and I desperately need a place where I can easily look through them versus just grabbing a fresh sheet.
 

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No, I still have this placed on a shelf in my shop. I upgraded to a Festool dust extractor about a year ago so I don't actually use the vacuum switch any more. At the time I just stored it in that cubby. I use the cubbies on the right for small scraps of sandpaper that have been transitioned to breaking edges by hand.
 
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